What Goes Into A Handcrafted Helmet Shell

The result takes longer to arrive than an off the shelf helmet, and that is by design. A made to order piece is fitted, finished and checked individually before it ships.

None of this needs to be bought at once. Building a complete kit over time, prioritising the areas most exposed in a typical fall, is a realistic way to get there.

Visors are a wear item, not a lifetime part of the helmet, and most riders find a spare on hand is worth having, especially before a long trip.

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 handcrafted helmet shell starts with a base material, commonly fibreglass or a composite blend, layered and shaped by hand rather than produced purely by mould and machine. Each layer adds strength, and the shaping stage is where a lot of the time in production actually goes.

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, Epicurist which earlier standards largely ignored.