A Second-Hand Helmet and a Lift Home

Gear does three jobs: abrasion resistance, impact absorption, and keeping the armour in place over the joint it protects.

• Jacket two sizes too big. The armour is sitting on your upper arm instead of your shoulder. On impact it rotates or slides away from the joint, and in a slide the excess fabric bunches and abrades through faster. It also flaps at speed, which is fatiguing and distracting.
• No gloves. Your hands are what you put out, and they are the first thing to touch bitumen. Beyond abrasion, bare hands in 34 °C heat get sweaty and lose lever feel - gloves are a control item as well as a protection item.
• Running shoes. Thin sole, no ankle support or protection, and laces that can catch on a peg or lever at a stop.

Rank them: the badly fitted jacket and the helmet are the two that fail structurally. Missing gloves is the most fixable tonight and the most likely contact point in a low-speed fall.

A helmet's protective capability comes mainly from the expanded polystyrene liner, which crush-deforms once to absorb an impact. It does not spring back, and a helmet that has taken a fall onto a hard surface can look perfect from outside while its liner is already compressed in the area that mattered.

That is why the seller's assurance is worth nothing here: the damage you are worried about is invisible from the outside, and you have no way to know its history.

You also cannot see a manufacturing date. Helmet liners and adhesives degrade with age and with heat - a helmet that spent years in a hot shed is not the same helmet it was when new, even if it was never dropped.

A helmet also has to fit. A loose or wrong-shaped helmet can rotate off in a slide, which is exactly the failure mode a full-face helmet is bought to prevent. The practical answer: buy new, buy the correct size, and replace after any impact.

No - not while you hold a learner permit. Victorian learner permit holders are not permitted to carry a pillion passenger. That ends the question before any of the equipment matters.

For the record, if you were fully licensed the lift would still need all of these:

• A helmet that fits him, approved and correctly fastened - he cannot borrow yours and he cannot go without, and a pillion without a proper helmet is illegal regardless of the distance.
• A proper pillion seat and footpegs, which this bike has.
• The bike adjusted for the extra weight: higher tyre pressures, more preload, longer braking distance, and a different feel through corners and at low speed.
• A briefing before he gets on: hold the rider's waist or the grab rail, keep feet on the pegs even when stopped, lean with the bike, and do not put a foot down.

Three kilometres is the argument people use to skip all of this. Three kilometres at 50 km/h is still a crash you have no protective gear for.

1. A new, correctly fitted helmet - the single item where a used purchase cannot be verified and where failure is catastrophic.
2. Gloves - cheapest item on the list, highest-frequency contact point, and they improve control feel once you are used to them.
3. A jacket that fits, so the armour stays on the shoulder, elbow and back where it was designed to sit.
4. Boots or proper riding shoes covering the ankle.

Heat is a gear-planning problem, not a reason to skip gear: a ventilated summer jacket and summer gloves handle 34 °C better than a baggy textile jacket and bare hands, and heatstroke is a real risk if you over-layer - the answer is the right gear for the weather, not no gear.