"Crashed" Helmets

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I'm sure I have pics of the lid somewhere, but it's not a lot different from most of these. I'll post 'em if I can find 'em.

Bike - 1990 GS-500E

Conditions - Freaking beautiful day, about 11:40 a.m. July 14th, 2001.

Speed- Varying between as fast as I could go and stopping a bit too quickly. I'd say 50 mph or so.

Gear - Shoei RF-800, AGV two-piece suit, cheap AGV boots, cheap Teknic gloves. Everything held up great up to the EMT's scissors. I still wear the suit (when I can fit in it) and the gloves and boots are still being used by friends. The suit's even been down again at Jennings at 90+ mph. It's not flashy like A* but it's freaking tough. I love it.

Cause - hit "highside hump" at TGPR, it didn't highside me but it did make me go wide off the corner exit and apparently I "edge trapped" getting back on the track and high-sided. (I have no actual memory of the event, all I remember was using my entire sailors' vocabulary on the EMTs as they cut my suit off.) ((Those bastards love cutting your gear up.)) ([{Oh, I also remember standing up just after the accident and being desperate to get my helmet off, feeling claustrophobic and wondering why I wasn't able to reach the chin strap, what with all my new elbows confusing my actions}])

Effect - Went airborne landed on my right side. Bike went elsewhere.

Resulting injuries - I broke damn near everything between my wrist and collarbone, severe concussion (apparently I'm a "large" in Shoei and this was an XL), humerus was poked into the asphalt.

Lessons learned 1. You're not invincible just becasue you're on a $650 bike wearing $1,000 worth of protective gear.

2. Your only words when crashing at TGPR should be "take me to UAB! Take me to UAB! Take me to UAB!" I went to Anniston and it was... bad. Third-world. Epically horrid. Two years later I got my arm bolted back together by a doctor who didn't go to school in a one-room shack in the woods of 'Bama and it's, oh, about 60% back to normal. :-|

3. Wear a lid that's just about too tight to wear. One that's too big is not that different from not wearing one at all.

4. Crashing, more often than not, freaking SUCKS. Unless you're getting paid by the thousandth of a second, ride at 80% or less. No one's impressed by your running 1:18s on a GS-500 if they have to put your bike in a truck and tote it to your house while you're wasting your days on morphine.

5. Minimum two flashy busses at a track day. When one dumbshit wrecks and takes the flashy bus away no one else can ride until the new bus gets there. This time is wasn't that bad, it just caused lunch to be a little early.

6. Barnacle Bill does great suit repair work. $100 to fix the EMT's work.

Edit: I hope these work, I have a lot of trouble posting pics from picasa.
elbow1.jpg


elbow2.jpg


 
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^^^ I was hoping he would post. . . . You should see the X-ray. Anniston had 18 screws and 2 plates, but the plates were next to each other, with no reinforcement on the other axis, and as a result the plates could flex. They failed inside a year, and he was walking around with a broken arm again.

I took Dad's Town Car up to Anniston to fetch him from the blood-letters. My car was a Ford Probe, and we thought the Town Car would be more comfortable and more roomy. In the hospital he had a button for morphine on demand. In the car he did not. This made him irritable somehow. It was unpleasant.

I didn't see his helmet, but I saw the bruise it made on his upper chest. If you inked the bottom of a helmet and used it as a stamp, that's what the bruise looked like. Like he said, it might have had a little leeway in its movement about his head.

 
This made him irritable somehow. It was unpleasant.
I didn't mean to be. :)
BTW, if you can see the pics you can see where there's no bone in the middle of my arm and that's obviously where it broke. The doc in Panama City that was working with me after the surgery, and eventually did the surgery that fixed the break, was worried about the huge gap in my ulna and never paid any attention to the humerus until it broke.

 
Thanks MadMike!!! The picture doesn't show the big hit right over the front center of the visor. I had a marked forehead for quite a while.....no headache, but was dizzy for a couple of weeks. We were both lucky!

 
I don't have any pix to offer. Every helmet I've crashed I've trashed for fear my cheapness, er, uhm, frugal-ness would lead me to wear it again.

After viewing all these skid lids, just think of how many wouldn't be with us to show pix had they been wearing 1/2 helmets, 3/4 helmets, or even worse beanie helmets.

I just recently discovered that quality boots are good too! :lol:

 
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