As you all know, Coffee (Dean) passed away a couple of years ago. I am Dean's ex-wife's husband and happen to have spent my career in tech. Over the years, I occasionally helped Dean with various tech issues.
When he passed, I worked with his kids to gather the necessary credentials to keep this site running. Since then (and for however long they worked with Coffee), Woodschick and Dirtdame have been maintaining the site and covering the costs. Without their hard work and financial support, CafeHusky would have been lost.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working to migrate the site to a free cloud compute instance so that Woodschick and Dirtdame no longer have to fund it. At the same time, I’ve updated the site to a current version of XenForo (the discussion software it runs on). The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.
Unfortunately, the new software version doesn’t support importing the old site’s styles, so for now, you’ll see the XenForo default style. This may change over time.
Coffee didn’t document the work he did on the site, so I’ve been digging through the old setup to understand how everything was running. There may still be things I’ve missed. One known issue is that email functionality is not yet working on the new site, but I hope to resolve this over time.
Thanks for your patience and support!
I've had a few vents pop off, not the end of the world. I ride in the rain all the time and Arai holds up pretty well. If they too get bad, you buy a new liner and cheek pads. To me Troy Lee Designs are more questionble.... you pay the big price for the name, styling and graphic designs, but it's built in a big any helmet factory.
I stand by my comment... based on my own helmet buying and owning experiences.
Buy your Fox or whatever helmets then. I'll listen to Hendrix and you listen to.... what was that guy's name?
"Scuse me... while I kiss this Arai"Norm, i don't know you but would never have guess Hendrix.
I am guessing that all the moisture rots out the interior padding? Had a similar problem racing boats, even in enclosed cockpits could get a lot of spray inside and some of that river water combined with sweat is pretty skanky. Learned a trick that helps, lightly wad up dry newspaper and place inside as soon as you are done and it wicks the moisture out. I still do this after a ride to pull out the perspiration.
Bingo. Not only are Shoei helmets more reasonably priced (although still high compared to most others)... they fit. Of all the helmets I've owned in the past 10 years (including 2 Arai), my Shoei's have by FAR, held up the best. "Hand made" ain't all it's cracked up to be, especially when the "hand fit" pieces fall off after a few rides... never to be found. I think the word Arai must be Japanese for over-rated.
Airoh Aviator was on top of my list, another nice Artisan Company, as you said. I'd been watching prices from the U.K. online dealers. I ordered the "Salminen Star" from Bottone's today. It will be a month, before they are released. Bottone's is just down the road from Olean, NY in Bradford, PA. Fran's wife works at another American product plant... Case Pocket Knives/Zippo Lighters. Still have my Case "Sodbuster Junior" pocket knife!
I priced a Shoei last month and price was about the same I'll pay for the Arai. I think Shoei is right up there in care of construction. You don't like Arai's and I do, so we'll leave it at that........
Norman. Tisk tisk. I think you may be taking my posts a bit too personally. This ain't Norman versus Krieg. It's Arai versus other helmet makers.
