Airmate 3 visor alternative?

[Kevin Jenness]

I have been looking at old threads about faceshields and thinking about my PPE gear. I have a Uvex face shield that I sometimes use when turning green wood and an old Airmate 3 with the yellow bump cap that I use when making more dust. Both are ANSI 87.1 rated, but I put calipers on the visors and found that while the Uvex measures .075" thick, the Airmate visor is only .035". The Uvex is labelled poycarbonate and I don't know what the other is made of. It is pretty flexible, as it is shipped flat and bent to attach to the cap's aluminum extrusion.

I may be overthinking this, but I wonder if anyone has sourced a stouter faceshield to fit the Airmate 3 headpiece? I've never had a direct hit by anything heavy, but there's always the chance.

 

[Bill Boehme]

There seems to be a universal misconception about faceshields that thicker is better. While that logic is valid for a lot of other situations where rigidity and mass are essential ingredients, polycarbonate takes a different approach to provide impact protection. A sharp impact would cause most plastics to shatter, but polycarbonate deforms and stretches to slow down a projectile thus dissipating the kinetic energy of the projectile. If the polycarbonate face shield were too thick then it wouldn't be able to deform and slow down the projective and the result would likely be that the faceshield gets knocked off the wearer's head. The optimum thickness of the polycarbonate depends somewhat on the headgear design and, if applicable, the frame design. So, we can't conclude one faceshield is better than another based on thickness of the polycarbonate. Both faceshields meet ANSI Z87.1 testing standard. Beware of some misleading advertisments that claim to exceed the Z87.1 requirements. You either meet the requirements or you don't.

 

[Kevin Jenness]

Thanks Bill, that makes sense

 

[Bill Boehme]

I've never had a direct hit by anything heavy, but there's always the chance.

Faceshields provide eye and face protection against small high-speed impacts. It's a false sense of security to expect a faceshield to protect you if a large object strikes it.

 

[Kevin Jenness]

Well, that's true, and I try to stay out of the firing line to minimize the chance as well as checking blanks for defects and keeping the rpm's in check. Still, the ppe is the final backup and judging from the occasional horror stories and near misses I want to be sure what I have is reasonably protective just in case.

 

[Bill Boehme]

I think that a worthwhile consideration would be how hard (or easy) is it to knock the faceshield off your head. The lightweight type that consists of a headband and a flip up visor are just delicately perched on your noggin and a gentle bump can dislodge it. If it has a knob to tighten the headband then that's an improvement. I like the idea of including head protection that you get from a hardhat such as the 3M Airstream or even better a helmet such as the 3M Versaflo M-300 or M-400 series. But nothing that is worn on the head can protect us from a major impact and it's worth noting that whatever kinetic energy gets transferred from the projectile to the headgear is eventually dissipated within the wearer's cranium (think scrambled brains). They say that the effect of concussions are cumulative and I would like to keep intact what few brain cells I still have.