INTERVIEW
even though it ‘passed’ all the tests. I hate weak chin bars; the tests are not that hard to ‘pass’. Do better. I want to design things that I want to wear, a question I throw around, ‘Would I want my kids in this?’ It can sometimes be frustrating for our industrial designers since their job is to make it look good. As long as I am still in charge, safety first will be the baseline. In aerospace, it was always about performance first. Lives depending on it, ah… same with our helmets. The purpose of in-moulding was to dissipate energy more efficiently. Turned out that a secondary benefit was in reduced weight … thinner shell, lighter EPS. Mass matters in a crash; it’s simple physics F=MA. We are trying to control the force and the mass… You control the acceleration.
In layman’s terms, talk us through Composite Fusion. Why is bonding the shell directly to the EPS foam superior to more traditional methods? By bonding the shell and foam, the transfer of energy between the two is more efficient. Since the two are now working together, a thinner shell could be used. That means the impact energy is getting to the EPS quicker to start to dissipate that energy. What Kali did was bring in-moulding to full face helmets. Once we started testing, we found we could reduce the thickness of the shell since the foam was right there to back it
28 | June 2026
up. A thinner shell meant that it could flex into the foam right away; you didn’t have to wait until the shell broke down or the head started crashing into the foam from the inside. We also discovered that we could lower the density of the EPS, putting softer things next to your head. Thinner shell and lower- density EPS mean a lighter helmet. In a crash, mass matters.
In the past, you’ve spoken before about the danger of the “gap” between the shell and the foam in full-face helmets. Are you one of the only brands tackling this specific engineering challenge? And if so, why? It is more expensive. Other companies have tried, but they were not willing to put the effort in, or they didn’t really understand how to apply it. In one case, the in-moulded helmet came out heavier; they didn’t understand that one key component was to make the shell thinner. When there is a gap between the foam and the shell, the impact hits the outer shell, and g-forces spike upward. The g-forces start to fall until the foam is contacted, and the g-forces rise again. This is all happening in milliseconds. As I mentioned before, it is not good to have your brain bouncing around the inside of your skull. When you eliminate that gap, the transfer of energy is immediate, the shell spreads the load over a larger area, and the foam starts to dissipate energy right away.
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