Community lead mandatory safety

Safety
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Warning: This thread is going to be preachy.

We’ve come a long way as a community in the last 12 months with regards to safety, for better or worse not many unsafe acts get past the esk8.news safety police these days and members who are not taking adequate precautions should expect to be challenged for two reasons.

  1. We don’t want to read another story about a member of our niche community in hospital or worse from an incident that could have been prevented or at least mitigated by the use of basic safety gear.

  2. When you fall over, break your bones or crack your skull you affect more than just yourself, much more in fact. Your loved ones have to worry and care for you, your acts end up being worse for them than you. You also put everything we’re doing here at risk because every single EV accident makes the news these days. Electric vehicles, for better or worse, are buzzwords right now and tabloids love an easy story. Being simplistic they don’t understand the difference between what we do here and a generic hire scooter and so lump us all together.

It’s important to remember that you are responsible for your board and the people who may ride it. Someone wants to borrow your board but doesn’t want to mess up their hairdo? Tell them to eat shit and ride off into the sunset with a clear conscience. Being safe is more important than looking cool in front of your perceived peers. Be consistent and be smart please.

Common arguments:

“I’ve gone downhill in my underwear at 97mph on 32mm wheels while eating a burger, I know what I’m doing” - That’s lovely, it’s also irrelevant when your wheels lock up from any one of the myriad of electrical problems that can and will occur on your board eventually from time or misuse. Wood, bearings and urethane are trustworthy, you know what they are going to do. Add motors, pulleys, DD, BMS, battery, ESC/s, switches, wiring, fuses, sag, drag and the list goes on… now you’re in the land of faceplant.

“I’ve been skating for 46 years and I’ve never hurt myself” - That’s lovely, see above.

“My friends make fun of me for wearing a helmet” - That’s lovely, get new friends because your friends are cunts.

Absolute basic safety gear should consist of a helmet, full face much more preferred but at the very least make sure that its a properly certified helmet, ideally designed for skating so that the back of your head is protected.

A more complete set of gear would be:

Full face helmet
Kneepads
Elbowpads
Gloves with wrist protection
Spine/chest protection
Correct footware
Hip pads of some sort

For recommendations please see and contribute to the below threads.

To prevent this thread from falling away into obscurity can we please use it to document our past and future failures and show vivid images of how a helmet, kneepad or glove has saved us from risky injuries? That way new members entering the forum can read this and get a sense of our safety culture and understand why we’re passionate about it.

Please tag people who have cracked a helmet open, lets see them!

Thank you. I shall go back to my regular activities now.

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Great topic Brent

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Only wearing helmet, gloves, and elbow pads at the time. Truck snapped underneath me and I’m not a heavy guy. Helmet saved my life or at the least many of my fine motor functions. Wish I was wearing hip and body armor. Nice outline of my spine.

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Stay safe and wear personal protective equipment (PPE)! I promise you look cool.

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You know what looks (and feels) the coolest? When someone (or you) goes down hard in full PPE, makes everyone cringe and pull out their phones to call 911 (or videotape, really), then they get right back up grab the board and keep riding. That’s my kind of cool. Nobody makes fun of Ironman’s suits, they’re just impressed by what crazy shit he can do in that thing and come out relatively unscathed. And yes, I just compared our super sweet safety gear to Ironman. :rofl:

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Great write up @Brenternet. My biggest pet peeve is seeing esk8 companies with marketing videos of riders in flip flops and no head protection. This just creates a false sebse of safety to the general public. Uf we could break that stereotype. And make people realise this is a motor vehicle al lot like a motorcycle they would understand the need for PPE.

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Just remember that a helmet is only part of it. Hips knees elbows spine, you need to worry about all that stuff. And my wife says your balls.

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I would love to see you with a jock strap outside of your pants :heart_eyes:

Please make this a reality at NYEF

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I like how it sounds like she’s talking about our balls. Not just your balls, but ours… Sweet lady. :slight_smile:

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Jock strap dont work, got hit twice in the dick durning lax and down for a solid ten minutes. It clamped down on my balls. Lol. Good thing is the trainers are hot.

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I’ll tell her you said that, she will laugh at your sweet innocence :grinning:

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I ain’t skeered :grinning:

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Can’t emphasize gloves WITH WTIST PROTECTION (slider gloves if you’re riding hard) and proper footwear enough. I’ve learned the hard way skipping with even just riding gloves that don’t have wrist protection and shoes with closed toes but were thin fabric. Had by foot come through my entire shoe and rip off multiple nails and still have mild nerve damage in my foot from the incident. Just because you have protection does not mean it is adequate protection - get the right gear and don’t skimp on it because even the little accidents can make activities of daily living a pain in the ass (or foot in my case) for months or even the long-term.

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I came off at 30mph mid July with motorcycle hoodie and met parachute full face… smashed helmet = no brain damage :white_check_mark:. Shredded sleeves to Kevlar = skin loss minimised :white_check_mark:. My knee and hip are still healing so I don’t go above 20mph without knee pads anymore! Looking into an Ironman suit. At 30mph I had no time to react to minimise damage, my ass being mostly in one piece is all down to the gear…

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sensible Brent is scary.

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I think this his alter ego, Bret. From the upside down K.U. where he’s chief of the safety police and abhors immature dick jokes and sexual innuendo. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Mate. I’ll shank you

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Bret wears horn rimmed glasses and sandles with socks though so nobody can recognise him.

Carries a notepad and a tiny pencil and hangs around train stations

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Typical Bret. So quick to violence. :roll_eyes: Safety police, amirite? :policewoman: Oh yeah, and Bret’s a woman. Didn’t you know?

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I’d do him

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