Why I Stopped Wearing Motorcycle Body Armour

These pads are useless; get an airbag: https://frt9.co/ffkrh5
Rukka D3O XTR (CE exceeding, massive pads that work): https://frt9.co/d5xm7f

Connect with us:
http://facebook.com/fortnine
http://instagram.com/fortnine
http://twitter.com/fortninecanada

Directed and Edited by Edwin El Bainou

hello as a gear retailer this is going to sound like some April Fool’s joke and it is but not on you see I’ve been wearing body armor for 20 years because that’s what motorcyclists wear like helmets are hard and headlights are bright pads are safe that’s my instinct and it’s wrong mostly motorcycle gear comes with shoulder elbow hip knee and a back pad mostly that’s the clunkiest part about riding gear but I never questioned its usefulness and most I wondered whether wearing a C1 pad would be safe enough compared to the even more annoying c2s so I did some surface level digging and pulling studies from the last 10 years reading the booklet you don’t have to dig deep to see these things in a different color see en n621 states that a pad has to take a realistic 50j hit and transmit less than 18 KES a C2 pad less than nine H what is the breaking strength of the strongest human bone 4 kons horse girls get body armor certified to that 4 Kon threshold so why is our motorcycle stuff two to four times weaker now Paul Verns very Works in performance verification and accreditation he tests this stuff and Paul says the standard for motorcyclist limb joint impact protectors set unadventurous requirements but were what the industry supported remember that the explanation was that the standards requirements were minimum manufacturers were free to develop higher performing products the actuality is that in the mass Market where price point is critical there was and is little or no ambition or incentive to do better than the standard requires that apathy extends to our body sizes too en 1621 sets a minimum size called type B in theory manufacturers are free to make them bigger but again material is money and variety is cost so you with your extra extra small jacket are going to get a type D pad and you with your extra extra large jacket are going to get a type B pad these are just too small and too thin to be of statistical benefit and the research can prove that see what they do is they look at a few thousand motorcycle crashes with known injuries and then they ask you each person what they were wearing no jacket a motorcycle jacket an armored jacket no pants motorcycle pants armored pants then you just try to correlate the injury patterns with the use of body armor but from Liz Dome study in 2011 despite the reduced risk of bruises and abrasions when wearing body armor the benefits could not be detected specifically in relation to fractures the enan in 2017 the allowable transmitted force of 1621 may be too high to effectively reduce the probability of impact injury this is not surprising given human tolerance levels that are reported in literature no significant difference was found between the impact protector’s material hardness and the presence of an impact injury danu in 2018 the protective effect was mainly due to a reduction in abrasions and lacerations protective clothing did not reduce the risk of fracture dislocation or Sprain and Meredith in 2019 the relationship between impact protector performance in the European standard test method and injury protection remains unclear so why then are these things everywhere I think it’s not about protection so much as protectionism see the European Standard stipulates that any Class A able a AAA rated garment must be sold with these impact pads that’s something like a leather jacket or a thick denim pant it’s actually illegal in a motorcycle shop in Europe to sell a class a garment without these what that means is that Revit Alpine Stars Dai ixen fan they don’t have to compete shelf to Shelf with universal Brands like coach or Levis or Patagonia never mind that the pads do nothing to protect our bones they’re very effective at protecting a captive market for the motorcycle industry remember it was the gear manufacturers that lobbied for such a low performance threshold to begin with there’s actually a term for this when a regulation meant for our Public Safety gets co-opted by an industry to become a convenient barrier to entry for its own competition the term is regulatory capture that is the quiet part the quiet term said loud now we have to be careful where we arrive with this because this stuff is life stuff so first there are Standalone back pads that look like this that go Way Beyond C standards I wear this on race day it works and there are airbags that go Way Beyond C standards I wear this every day it works but should we stop putting up with these tokens and I won’t sit here and tell you to take the armor out of your jacket because it is somewhat protective of course it is you can slide on this it might save you a bruise maybe in some statistical anomaly it’ll save you a fracture I can’t tell you to take the armor out of your jacket I can just tell you that I take the armor out of my jacket and I love it life is so beautiful our instinct is going to be to protect it but our imperative we have to remember is to appreciate it [Music] [Music]