About Billyscrashhelmets

Welcome to Billy’s Crash Helmets!

It’s Feb 2012 and I’ve been hunting around for a helmet for about a week now. My old Shoei has been looking tatty (for about four years!) and a few weeks back, it dawned on me that eight years is probably too long to keep the same helmet! My brains are probably worth spending a couple of hundred quid on from time to time and so I decided to set out and find the right helmet, on a budget.

So far it’s been purgatory. The sites I’ve been looking at either seem to be full of techno-babble talking about triple layered this and dynamic airflow that – and it’s not really the sort of info that makes much sense to me. Plus, I really want to know that I’m getting a good deal and there doesn’t seem to be anywhere that fills me with confidence that I’m getting one.

So, I’ve decided to start my own crash helmets site. I’ll aim to make it as real-world and useful as I can. To date, we’ve lots of helmet reviews with links to where you can buy them. It’ll not be me selling the helmets – I’ll simply trawl the pages of different retailers to find the best ones I can link to.

And if you click through from the site and buy something, if I’ve managed to set up a deal with the retailer, I should get a small percentage out of the sale (called affiliate marketing). But if I see a great helmet and can’t get an affiliate relationship going (like most of those on the deals page), it’ll still be displayed on the site.

At the moment, we’ve got links to a handful of retailers – if you click through from our site to theirs and buy something, we get a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you (cheers!).

We’ll look at lots of crash helmets – but I reckon that if you’re going to wear a crash helmet, it might as well be one which is tested as thoroughly as possible – so from about Jan ’14 we’ve focused heavily on crash helmets that score either a 4 or 5 star Sharp safety rating (where they perform well as useable, everyday helmets too).

That said, we will include other helmets on the site, just our recommendations will be to go for the safer helmets, which will generally score better than less safe helmets because safety is one of our star review criteria that you’ll find at the bottom of the page.

Note, where a helmet hasn’t been reviewed but where we think it’ll score highly for safety (usually based on overall safety performance of the brand or similar helmets in the range) we’ll probably still include a review.

How Do our Helmet Reviews Work?

So far, I don’t (mostly) get hands on with the helmets myself. What I do is hunt around the web for reviews, comments, forum posts, videos – anything and everything we can find that relates to a specific helmet model – to find out what folks who’ve spent their hard-earned dosh on the helmet and who’ve used it in anger on the road – what they think of the lid.

I reckon that’s much more relevant than getting a helmet sent out and fiddling about with it for a few days then passing judgment anyhow. You live with a helmet through winter filth and the (slightly) less filthy days of summer and that’s how you get to know a helmet’s limitations – not by getting one delivered in the post, gawping at it a bit then popping down the shops in it for a ‘road test’.

The internet’s a wonderful thing and is full of folks giving their opinions on all kinds of welcome – and not so welcome – topics. So I use it to get a wide range of helmet users’ and owners’ thoughts and opinions, shove them all in a pot, stir them around a bit, then dish them out in generous dollops in our reviews.

And if you’d like to join in, visit the contact page and drop us a note about your helmet – or write it in the comments section at the bottom of most pages – we’d love to know what you think and may well publish your thoughts at the bottom of the review page.

So there you have it. Independent advice, information from bikers who wear/own the helmets and a single useful repository for all things to do with skid lids.

Wish me luck!

Billy
(Feb 2012)