Neck Protection: Let's Talk About It

661

It’s not on the market yet, but rumors of the elusive 661 neck brace/chest protector have long been circulating. Upon visiting the 661 headquarters in Valencia, California, we got a chance to preview the “Droid,” hear about the concept of it and the development behind it from Eddie Cole, president of the Valencia Sport Group, Inc.

“We’ve been working on this now for about three years, actually,” Cole said. “So it’s been a long development process – a lot of trial and error.”

Like EVS, neck protection is not a new concept to 661, as they had neck rolls on the market as early as eight years ago.

“One of our first products was the foam neck rolls and what we call ‘neck nuts’ which Velcro onto the front like a big foam donut,” Cole recalled. “That technology really was borrowed from go-kart racing and some auto racing. There were three or four companies in motorcycling that had neck rolls and neck nuts and a configuration of that and we were one of them. In fact, it was one of our number one selling items in the whole product line. We were very interested in developing the neck brace protection and taking it to the next level.”

In an interesting twist to the story, Cole revealed that the Valencia Sport Group, Inc. had even expressed interest in getting involved with Leatt.

“We had some preliminary discussions with the Leatt people [Chris Leatt and Geoff Patterson],” Cole said. “We were interested in this category because 661 is a body protection company, and we knew that they were going to find some solution in North America so we actually talked to them a little bit about distributing their product. For a bunch of different reasons, that didn’t work out. We were probably not the right mechanism for them. They went their separate way. I think they have a great product.”

“We showed them the brace that we had developed before we even saw their brace,” Cole continued, referencing Leatt and company. “It was a combination of injection-molded plastic and biofoam that was a little bit stiffer. So that’s how this project started.”

“We started out with just a glorified neck roll,” Cole said. “The inspiration for that was just our own neck nut and neck roll. We were looking to get to the next level to stop that hyperextension, but we couldn’t figure out how to stabilize just that neck ring. Then when we put it into a compete unit, we felt like we really ended up stabilizing it and getting what we were looking for. It didn’t migrate or move around on the upper body.”

The 661 Droid is a design unlike any other in that it is built into a chest protector.

“It comes with three different size blocks for the back and the sides to be able to raise it or lower it depending on the size of your neck and where you’re comfortable with your helmet landing on the pads,” Cole said. “The front is a two-piece with a hinge, so it’s real comfortable. There’s biofoam padding all underneath so it’s just like a normal chest protector.”

Another unique design feature with the Droid is that it gives you the choice of attaching the back piece or not (see photo right).

“Being in the roost-deflector business, we find that about 50% of the people want chest protection without a back and then about 50% want something that has the back. So this gives you both of those options.”

As far as its concept of protection, it’s similar to that of the Leatt and Alpinestars braces, but with what Cole feels is one major distinctive benefit.

“It’s the same basic principle as other neck braces that are on the market in that your helmet is going to bottom out on these landing pads in every direction,” said Cole. “It’s going to stop that hyper-extension. The difference in our protector is that force, when it’s applied to the landing pads, is transferred throughout the whole upper torso instead of just specific areas [on the chest and upper back]. We’re transferring the force throughout the whole upper body. We think that’s a big benefit from a safety perspective.”

One of the original founders of 661, Steve Behrens, who is now working as an industrial designer and product design consultant, talked about the function of the design.

“When the halo around the neck is impacted, that’s going to naturally disperse the load into the front and back panel and over the shoulder which will then take a lot of pressure off the spine,” Behrens explained. “Those areas there act as naturally suspension. The rib cage and the shoulder blades, they’re all very flexible. They can move and take a lot of force.”

As far as backing up their claims with lab research in the form of crash testing – you won’t find much. You won’t find any, actually. But what you will find is years of development in the field, and load testing done on the Droid by way of a computer simulation known as FEA (Finite Element Analysis), which Behrens explains, is to figure out how much load it would take to break the plastic.

“Our company’s pretty interesting in that it’s made up of riders that decided to work in this industry,” Cole stated. “There’s not a lot of degreed engineers or a lot of medical doctors walking around in these hallways. It’s a bunch of motocross guys and dirt bike guys and gals that decided that this is what they wanted to do. So we took a very simple approach, frankly. We looked at the product from a rider’s perspective. What would be comfortable? What would be the right weight? And how do we add protection in the areas that we think are important? So we started out by really sketching this thing out from a rider’s perspective, not from a medical perspective.

“It’s no more complicated than that. We got lots of really good feedback on, ‘Okay, it’s comfortable, I can ride in it, it stops my head in all different directions from hyperextension, and here we are.’”

“What we’ve done is taken upper body protection really kind of to the next level where we’ve incorporated neck stabilization and a brace and yet we’ve also solved the problem where you can have roost protection and we’ve dispersed the load throughout the whole upper body,” Cole summed up. “You don’t have to worry about, ‘What do I do about a protector?’ and, ‘How do I fit my brace into that?’ So I think we’ve come to the market with a very reasonably priced solution to a lot of the existing problems with neck braces and chest protectors being developed by two different companies.”

Click here for  Investigating the Neck Brace Revolution: Part 2