Louis Gray says he was racially profiled after trying to buy spray paint to make over his son’s bicycle helmet

  • Paragone@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    Spray-paint tends to be solvent-based, and spraying it onto a helmet can fundamentally compromise its structure/strength.

    Please don’t ever use solvent-based stuff on multi-layer plastic helmets, for sake of your brain, who needs that helmet to work properly, when one gets slammed into the asphalt/concrete.

    Please.

    • That seems a bit unlikely. The solvents quickly evaporate off. Unless you are soaking it in solvents, there won’t be enough to cause any relevant effect. Meanwhile the helmet is exposed to UV light on a daily basis, which will also degrade it over time.

      You are also not going to burn from briefly touching laundry detergent, but keeping lots of it on your skin would be a problem.

      • datelmd5sum@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        Helmets are usually polycarbonate and the common solvent in spray paint is xylene. Xylene causes extreme degradation in polycarbonate. If you don’t know if the helmet and the paint are compatible, it’s not safe to paint it.

    • ifGoingToCrashDont@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      That’s not how helmets work. The outer shell certainly helps mitigate bumps and bangs, but what really protects your head is the styrofoam inner that compresses like an airbag upon impact.

      • Neato@ttrpg.network
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        2 years ago

        No it’s both. The outer shell deforms before breaking and then the foam absorbs the rest of the impact.