Neck Protection: Let's Talk About It

EVS

“Moving the barrier of injury” is the concept behind every piece of protective gear at EVS, including the RC Evolution. The fourth generation of their race collar product line, EVS can quite easily claim that neck protection is not a new concept for them.

“I’ll say we’ve had neck brace products for about eight years now,” said Guido Reitdyk, president of EVS. “We probably started working on [the RC Evolution] about four years ago.”

“Our development of this product really started with our product we’ve had in the past, the RC1 – the neck donut. We were one of the first ones to come out with it. From that, we developed an RC2 which was a more sculpted, more form-fitting neck roll.

“Basically, all our other products we have the good, better, best program,” Rietdyk explained. “For example, for knee braces, we have soft knee braces, then knee braces that have a little more rigidity to them, to completely rigid. So we said for neck braces we want to do the same thing where we go from soft to a harder, more limiting, to a completely limiting version of that same product group.”

In what they call a natural evolution (hence the name) of developing protective wear, EVS set out to create a neck protection system with a rigid frame, and started by drawing from their already extensive experience in building energy dispersing protective gear.

“There were three elements we set out to design,” Rietdyk said. “We said, ‘Okay, we need to design something that has a soft-to-hard frame, it has to have a large dispersal area, and it has to be a flexible program.”

Rietdyk goes on to explain the three elements.

“One school of thought is to have a firm, hard lock and I think everybody except for us has that. What we said is, ‘Before you hit the hard stop – which is the frame – lets have a soft prelude to that. That’s the combination that we have and no one else has that.

“Secondarily, we looked at the entire amount of energy being placed on someone’s head when they’re really wrecking into the ground. That’s a large amount of energy, and that energy has to go somewhere. Energy in equals energy out – it’s just a law of physics. We need a way out – a dispersion mechanism – for that energy. In order to absorb energy, we use the technology from our knee brace, and that is to use the energy to break, flex or deform a component. That’s energy that would otherwise break your skeletal structure. So we said we want to have a semi-rigid component. We want to have a semi-rigid outer shell so that allows the product to use the energy rather than that energy breaking your neck.

“Finally, when we’re talking about absorption of the energy, we want to absorb it and disperse it over as large an area as possible. That’s why you’re seeing that these areas [on the RC Evo] are very large. And that’s where we also differ with the other products on the market.”

In coming up with a design, EVS set out to build upon their original concept, rather than go down the same path other companies at the time were. They drew inspiration from football equipment – and area in which the company already had some familiarization.

“We have for a very long time dealt with product development in football because of our knee-bracing so we’re familiar with that research and the doctors that we work with work also with football players,” Rietdyk said. “The product we actually looked at most at that time was McDavid. The McDavid [Cowboy Collar] (pictured right) is a shape that you’ll recognize in this.” (www.McDavidUSA.com)

Photo right: The Cowboy Collar by McDavid - designed for football - was the inspiration behind the EVS RC Evolution.

One of the key differences in the EVS system as compared to others is the ability for your head to come forward. Rietdyk explains the reasoning behind this unique design feature.

“With the Leatt brace, you cannot lower your chin very much; with Alpinestars you can do a little bit more of it. What 661 is coming out with is also pretty limiting,” Rietdyk said. “We’ve really felt that it was a pretty big design flaw on all their parts because it doesn’t allow you to do any tuck and roll. What’s the first thing you learn when you’re little? You tuck and roll. The natural tendency of the body when you’re falling off the bike is to tuck in your head. Those braces don’t allow you to do that, and they place your head up where it’s actually much more vulnerable to impact, or an injury from spinal compression, which is exactly what you’re trying to avoid. That’s why we limit you to the point where you will not be able to move your chin all the way to your sternum, but we want you to have a pretty good range of motion. We feel that that’s a very strong feature of our product.”

The development of the RC Evolution was rather lengthy on account of developing the exact semi-rigid compound they were looking for.

“We spent an enormous amount of time designing this,” Rietdyk said. “Part of it is hard, but the edges, for example, are all semi-soft. There are very few factories that can actually do this kind of injection molding which is a co-molding. There are almost no factories that can make it on a big piece like this. The mold for [the RC Evo] is like the size of a small VW. The injection pressure to build it this way is enormous. That technology itself was a very big hurdle to jump to get that point.”

After developing their prototypes, EVS found the results it was looking for after extensive testing of the RC Evo at Dynamic Research Inc, a facility in Torrance which handles automobile crash testing for Honda and Toyota.

“We rigged a crash-test dummy with all this gear on and we basically did four different tests,” Rietdyk explained. “We had it suspended as a pendulum test and we did one where it’s on an angle falling down onto a board and we did one where it’s knocking over a piece of metal. It hits, and knocks over the block. The four things that we chose, we had fantastic results. However, they’re fairly meaningless in the real world. It totally depends on the speed you’re going, it totally depends on which angle you’re falling at off your bike. So for us to go out there and say, ‘We will save 40% of the impact energy...’ that’s a lie. It would be completely meaningless to say.

“For our own confidence, in these limiting variables situations, [our test results were] very good. Coupled with the testimonials we’re receiving from doctors saying that the patient wouldn’t have survived if they didn’t have something like this on... we know that we’re on the right track with it.

“I think the concept we have is unique and it’s strong,” Rietdyk concluded. “We like a soft component with a hard component. That’s the EVS philosophy about protective gear and we’ve been one of the biggest leaders in purely protective gear.”