Bell Sweep helmet.
Industrial design by Hilgard Muller. It is my belief that this is the best work I ever did with Hilgard.
My role as lead mechanical saw an alarming challenge. The first design for the retention system allowed for post-molding insertion of the strapping system. But we found that if you shook the front webbing in a certain way, it would just fall out. This is not good when helmets are about to be shipped to athletes in the Tour de France. My friend Dave Stroud and I retrofitted each helmet with hot glue so the flaw could not happen. While riders crashed in the Tour that year, no athletes' helmet popped off due to faulty strapping. I was sorry they crashed, of course, but happy we fixed the issue in time. We abandoned the method for attaching the webbing post-molding and went back to traditional strap bones for production.
