Your New Motorcycle Helmet's Fit is Too Tight?
Never mind laminate-complex shell materials and super-cooling air vents, if your motorcycle helmet doesn't fit comfortably on your head, it could cause you no end of misery.The new motorcycle helmet looked great, you tried it on in the shop and you bought it. Now you discover your cool new motorcycle helmet gives you a headache when you wear it for 30 minutes or more. The shop won't take it back for safety and hygiene reasons, so what do you do?
Professional helmet technicians will compress the polystyrene inner liner a little at key points, typically the back of the head, forehead and the temples. It's not a job for the unskilled, as that's the layer that crumples in an accident to absorb energy and reduce damage to your head.
One export helmet technician told us: 'In a huge number of cases, the problem's tightness across the forehead. This is often caused at the back of the helmet. Feel for the lump that sticks out a little at the back of you head about halfway up. Typically this is pulling the helmet back and making it tight over the forehead. Gently compressing the polystyrene line by about 1mm here solves the problem in most cases. It's not something we recommend people do themselves because if they get t wrong there's safety implications. And we do hear of horror stories where people have gone at their helmet with hot spoons and other crazy things. Tightness issues can go away over time, as the helmet beds in anyway.'
If you do have a problem with helmet fit, go back to the shop you bought it from. A good helmet salesman will have some training and should be able to help. If that doesn't help contact the manufacturer. An increasing number of brands offer different sizes of comfort padding such as the cheek pads, crown pad and other which can help too.
