Not Useless - Motorcycle Body Armour

The ending joke killed me. Nice video, have a like

Would be really cool if you did the same testing but with something like a modeling clay to show the permanent deformation.

The impact energy in your test (assuming you just dropped the weight) is ~98 joules. Impact velocity is ~15km/h. It is important to note that usual impact speeds exceed 30km/h and the mass is way greater than 2-3kg/cm squared. While your test shows that armor makes a difference, it does not paint an accurate picture of what damage occurs at real life speeds. A more accurate measurement would be to drop that 10kg weight from 4-5+ meters and see the result on a ballistic gel dummy with bones and everything, wearing armor.

Great video, I love when people do their own science. Quick question on your results for the body armour, do you think using packing foam would miss represent your results? By that I mean that bone is brittle, packing foam is elastic (to a point) and so potentially the impact with the body armour is being masked by being under the elastic limit of the foam. That doesnt mean that the body armour does nothing, it clearly does in your test, its more a case of its quite hard to compare the damage done to foam to that which would occur to bone. I dont know how you could test to solve this problem, maybe test using ceramic tiles underneath a very thin layer of foam to mimic bone under a thin layer of muscle/skin? Either way great video!

Besides being an April joke, Rian did not tell anyone has to give up wearing body armor. Just that they are not making the job as good as they should do. Of course wearing any protection is absorbing shocks better than bare skin. But the benefit of wearing the "regular" armor is really not up to the cost, discomfort and pretensions of the manufacturer...