We all hate crashing. But when it happens, it’s nice to know you have a helmet on your head that’s going to protect you during impact. Recently, there’ve been a number of improvements in helmet safety technology all designed to reduce the impact to your brain and prevent a serious head injury. Most companies are using some sort of unique approach but for 6D Helmets, their Omni-Directional Suspension System certainly stands out.
Using a shell in shell design that is suspended with many elastomeric isolation dampers, the result is supposedly a helmet reduces impact to the brain in both low, medium, and high speed impacts. With no other helmet quite like it, the only limiting factor was that it was only available in a downhill specific full face helmet. Well, for now…
Showing one of the first six prototype helmets they’ve had, this helmet is equal parts production level parts and 3-D printed pieces. One thing that is clear right off the bat, just like their full face helmet, the ATB-1A trail helmet has quite a bit more volume than your standard Half Shell helmet.
That’s of course due to the fact that 6D helmets use two separate EPS layers that are separated by the ODS dampers. While the dampers are inmolded to the EPS layers on the downhill ATB-1, the trail ATB-1A will require a polycarbonate carrier due to space and size constraints. Using 26 ODS dampers compared to 27 on the DH helmet, the dampers are also a bit smaller. For the inner layer of EPS, the polycarbonate carrier will snap into place. According to 6D, the helmet will have the potential of replacing the softer inner EPS layer after a crash as long as the outer layer is still in good shape.
Pricing and weight is still TBD, but 6D expects it to be “competitive.” Final production versions should be available around spring of 2016.
