UK Helmet Parachute breakdown.
First the establishing shots of the outside and basic interior, and the rarely-seen crown stamp, with the NP for National Plastics, date of 1998, size L for Large, and part of the Nato Stock Number. The basic substance of the shell seems to be black, the green paint is quite roughly textured, both in and out.
And here’s the basic interior shell liner - cheap polystyrene, almost throwaway. The cork panels are intended as easy breakouts to make using a comms headset more comfortable. The front has two cutouts, the back one. I do not know what the front cutouts are for - the one at the back is to allow access to the reat chinstrap fixing bolt.
The interior of the interior. The white-ish panel in the crown is residue from where the (missing) makers’ label would have been glued. Its easy to see how fragile the liner really is. There are two rather insubstantial rubber pads, glued fore and aft, the rear one shown in the detail picture.
The cradle is a simple plastic structure, stapled and perhaps glued, with the cloth element sewn to it. There is a thin foam rubber strip beneath the cloth. This is all essentially the same as the earlier para helmet liner, the only real difference being the black leather browpiece as opposed the white leather fitted to the earlier models.
I have several of these helmets and I would truly like to dismantle them all, to see the liner mouldings if nothing else (its a harmless obsession…) but this is actually fantastically difficult. I have taken a couple apart but that’s been down to luck rather than skill or appropriate kit. It seems to me that a snake-tongue screwdriver is essentially for undoing these bolts, but finding one of an appropriate size is proving impossible, and so far all attempts to *make* a succesful tool have ended in tears of frustration (I only exaggerate very slightly). As this liner is *meant* to be replaceable in the event of even slight damage there has to be a way of doing this a lot more quickly and easily than I can manage. A tool found only in the QM stores, perhaps. Anyone got any ideas? The problem is that the slotted nut (which is on the inside, embedded within the polystyrene liner shell) has to be held firm so that the bolt can be undone. The nut is 15mm diameter, and the shaft of the bolt 5mm. Improvisation does not work. So far.
