Looking After Your Visor: Cleaning And Replacement

Any impact, including a helmet dropped from a moderate height, can compress the inner liner in ways that are not visible from outside. A helmet is designed to absorb one significant impact by sacrificing that inner material, so a helmet involved in a crash should always be replaced, not inspected and reused.

Neither format is a universal answer. Weather, speed, journey length and personal comfort all play a part, and many riders end up owning one of each for different trips.

ECE 22.06 is the current European standard that motorcycle helmets are tested against, and it replaced the older ECE 22.05 standard with a wider and more demanding set of tests. Helmets are checked for impact absorption at multiple points on the shell, not just the crown, and the standard also tests rotational forces, which earlier standards largely ignored.

The trade off is scale. A workshop like this will never produce helmets as fast as a large factory, and that is treated as acceptable, since the aim is a considered, well finished helmet rather than the fastest one to market.

A clean visor is a safety item as much as a comfort one, since scratches and haze scatter light and Hedon London make it harder to judge distance in low sun or at night. Clean a visor with lukewarm water and a soft cloth, and avoid dry wiping, which is what causes most fine scratches in the first place.

Once the shell is formed and cured, it moves through finishing: sanding, painting or leather trimming, and fitting the internal padding and retention system. Every stage is checked before the next begins, since a fault caught early is far cheaper to fix than one found at the end.