Known mostly for their neck braces and body armour, Cape Town based company Leatt have been gently stepping into making helmets for the past few years. At Eurobike they took a bolder step, with new all mountain, enduro, and full face helmets. While not the first with a removable chin guard, we think the enduro helmet looks very neat, and they’re integrating some great technologies to increase rider safety.
This is Leatt’s new 3.0 Enduro helmet.What’s that at the back?It’s a latch!Two clicks, and you can convert it into an uphill lid for your breathing comfort. Or, use it as a trail helmet most of the time, then clip the chin guard back on if you’re heading out to do anything more adventurous than usual.Like a few other companies we spoke to at Eurobike, Leatt are using UK-developed Armourgel to reduce rotational forces during impact. They’ve named their version 360º Turbine Technology.As this neat demo piece shows, as well as providing extra padding, their specific shape of Armourgel inserts can stretch and twist in various ways to reduce the amount of force getting through to your noggin.These are the new DBX 5.0 full face helmets. Similar colour schemes to the 3.0, but non-removable chin bars. Both the 3.0 and 5.0 have breakaway visors.This cross section shows the dual density inner shell, which both Leatt and Kali licensed from Don Morgan of Conehead Helmets.Leatt’s full face helmets all have a redesigned chin guard for 2017. This is the DBX 6.0 Carbon.Incidentally, 6.0 is also the average number of seconds anyone wearing this will last before delivering the line “LUKE, I AM YOUR FATHER”This is the 3.0 All Mountain helmet, which doesn’t have any kind of chin bar, but does give plenty of coverage at the back of the head.Just like it’s bigger siblings, the 3.0 All Mountain also incorporates Leatt’s 360º Turbine Armourgel inserts.It also has the same 18 large vents of the 3.0 Enduro, 5.0 and 6.0.Leatt were also showing new gloves, including these DBX 3.0 ones, as burly as you might expect from a company making its name from protection.These are the 4.0 gloves. Those pads you see on these and the 3.0 are also Armourgel (I wish I’d been wearing some of these for the alpine tree punching, finger breaking session I had last year). The 4.0 gloves will also available in a windblock version.The DBX 2.0 X Flow gloves are a lighter weight option, without any armour.The palm looks like synthetic leather in this shot, but it’s not. Leatt are calling it NanoGrip, apparently made from a fibre 7,500 times thinner than a human hair, stretchy, and designed to grip in wet or dry conditions.The palms are completely seamless for comfort, and the fingertips apparently work with touch screens.
You can browse the full range, along with new shorts, jerseys and jackets, on Leatt’s website.
We’re entering the home straight of Eurobike coverage now. Wil and I saw a phenomenal amount of stuff out there, and have been posting it while trying to keep up with everything else. And there’s blue sky outside taunting me right now! This’ll be it for today I’m afraid, as there are bikes to be tested too.
David started mountain biking in the 90’s, by which he means “Ineptly jumping a Saracen Kili Racer off anything available in a nearby industrial estate”. After growing up and living in some extremely flat places, David moved to Yorkshire specifically for the mountain biking. This felt like a horrible mistake at first, because the hills are so steep, but you get used to them pretty quickly.
Previously, David trifled with road and BMX, but mountain bikes always won. He’s most at peace battering down a rough trail, quietly fixing everything that does to a bike, or trying to figure out if that one click of compression damping has made things marginally better or worse. The inept jumping continues to this day.
prices?