DARREN COPE

About this time last year, I was looking for a new road helmet. I did some research, and decided I wanted to get something that had some more ‘advanced’ protection than the usual helmets. However, I also wanted it to look like a normal road helmet. At that time, MIPS was really not available in a road helmet. However, my research lead me to discover Conehead Technology, which uses an advanced foam construction, shaped with cones and using dual-density foam to provide greater protection. I really liked the idea and the research seemed sound, so I began looking for helmets using the technology. Kali Protectives and SCOTT are the only two authorized users of the technology, and SCOTT (at that time) did not make a road helmet. I also closely investigated the POC Octal; although it doesn’t use Conehead Technology, it has increased coverage and protection and is safer than other helmets.

Kali Phenom

I was able to find a POC Octal to try on at a local shop, and despite it being very comfortable and light, I balked a bit at the cost… quite a bit more than I was hoping to spend, and the look, which–despite being popularized by Team Garmin, didn’t really do it for me! So I did some more research, and decided that it was worth the trouble to track down a Phenom from Kali Protectives.

Let me put this out there: they are very difficult to find in Canada. I emailed a bunch of shops that dealt with the distributor, and they either a) didn’t deal with Kali any more, b) didn’t have/couldn’t get a Phenom, or c) would have to special order and then ship to me. I then looked at the typical online stores, and only Art’s Cyclery seemed to have them in stock. Unfortunately, at that time, they only had black, and I wanted white. I then turned to Amazon, where I found a US dealer that would ship to Canada (most will not!) I ordered one for myself. My helmet arrived in time for spring riding.

My first impressions of the helmet were…just OK. It was nice and light, so that was a major plus. When I put the helmet on, wow! It fit me VERY WELL. The retention system comes very far down along the ears/side of the head compared to most helmets, but it allowed for the helmet to lock down rock solid. It didn’t move around at all on my head, and felt very solid. Awesome! On the first ride with the helmet, I noticed that it sits very low on the head, and actually becomes visible in the peripheral vision while riding. This is a bit of a ‘different’ sensation at first, but something I quickly blocked out and it didn’t become an issue.

By this point, Krystelle had tried on my helmet, and liked it so well (it also fit her perfectly!) that I ordered another one for her–this time from the only other vendor I could find that would ship to Canada. It also arrived in time for the start of her riding season; thus we both started 2014 with new Kali Phenom’s on our heads. I vowed to take good care of this helmet, as it was quite expensive, and I was putting more thought to protecting my brain. As such, I bought a helmet pod to transport the helmet, and was extremely careful with the helmet any time it wasn’t on my head to avoid any impacts, bumps, scrapes, etc. I wanted the helmet to be in perfect shape should it unfortunately be called into service to do its job of saving my brain.

So overall, my first impressions of the Kali Phenom were pretty good. However, there were some issues. Firstly, the helmet is advertised (even on the Kali website) to come with an ‘Included Aero/Winter cover’ – mine did not come with one. I wrote to the seller, who agreed to give me a bit of a refund to make up for it, but it was still a bit disappointing. I expected that when I ordered Krystelle’s helmet, it would come with said cover, and I could just use that one. Unfortunately, her helmet also did not come with an Aero/Winter cover. I suspect this cover does not exist (see below for more on this), and no Kali ever shipped has come with one. Please correct me if I’m wrong! This was not a deal breaker for me though, as it was only a ‘nice to have’ anyway–I would have only worn it on those rare cold and wet rides that I do maybe once or twice a year.

Some other, potentially more important issues, did exist though. Firstly, the overall construction of the helmet looked a bit ‘rough’ compared to the Giro helmets I’ve had in the past, and other high-end helmets I’ve tried on or inspected in stores. The foam was not nicely finished (rough along the edges, etc.) and it had a bit of a ‘cheap’ look to it. I attributed this to the different method that Kali has to use to mold in the ConeHead technology, and figured it was worth the tradeoff for the additional safety.

The other thing I noticed is that the straps were a bit thicker, stiffer, and heavier than high end helmets from other manufacturers. Not a big deal, and, as I mentioned above, the overall fit and feel of the helmet was very comfortable, so it didn’t really cause an issue so much as give the impression of a helmet bought in the late 90’s.

One other item that gave a poor impression was that the logo stickers were very cheap looking, and just kind of slapped on to the outside of the helmet, rather than nice printed logos like most helmets have. I suppose that’s good if you want to take them off, and probably looks OK from a distance, but from up close, it contributes to the ‘cheap’ feel of the helmet.

I must say though, that after all of this, I was still overall a believer in the helmet. It fit me fantastically, was nice and light, and (in theory at least) provided more brain protection than other helmets available. All good things!  As such, I rode the helmet for most of the 2014 season (until about September,) putting in about 5000km while wearing it. Until one day, I was putting the helmet on before a ride, and it felt…kinda loose. Thinking that perhaps the adjustment dial got shifted or something, I took it off my head, and noticed that the retention system had actually snapped in two, leaving it broken and dangling. What the hell? This was a ~6 month old helmet, with only 5000km of use, that had been babied and carried in a helmet pod for transport. How could this happen, and when did it happen without me even noticing? Did it break while on my head on the previous ride? While I was taking it off? Or while it was stored between rides? All of those situations should be unacceptable for a piece of safety gear! Luckily, I still had an older Giro that was in good shape, so was able to wear it for the remainder of 2014. Below are some pictures of the break in the retention system. You’ll also see the foam, straps and stickers in the images below.

Broken retention system. Also note tacky stickers and rough construction of the foam portion.

Here is where things get messy. I still liked the Phenom, and, expecting the breakage to be a bit of a fluke, was willing to give them another shot. I did a quick search of their website for any warranty information. I found… nothing. Nothing at all about warranty on the website of a helmet manufacturer. Hmm.. not good! Finding nothing online, I took some photos of the break (those shown above,) and emailed Kali, asking about their warranty. Here’s the chain of emails:

Oct 24, 2014

From: Darren

To: Kali Protectives

Oct 27, 2014:

From: Steve Hays Territory Manager, California – Kali Protectives

To: Darren

Hi Darren.  Thanks for contacting Kali Protectives again. (note: I had contacted them earlier regarding Canadian dealers and availability)  That just looks like the retention system broke.  No problem.  Please send me your email address, and I can get you taken care of.

Oct. 27, 2014

From: Darren
To: Steve Hays

Dec.1, 2014

Dec. 2, 2014

From: Steve Hays

To: Darren

Darren – Since you are in Canada, I can give you the contact point of the distributor in Canada.  It’s Passion Sports.  They do all distribution in Canada.

Dec 2, 2014

From: Darren
To: [email protected]

Dec 31, 2014

From: Darren

To: [email protected]

CC: Steve Hays at Kali

Dear Passion Sports,

And so here we are. It’s now Jan. 13, 2015, and there has been no response or resolution to any of these emails. I have a broken helmet, that was used for one summer. The company is unresponsive and unable to answer questions about their product, and advertise features that don’t exist.  What do you think? Would you buy a Kali product? Should Krystelle even keep using hers, or it it unsafe? What do I do if I ever do get a replacement? Wear it? Or be scared of it? Can we trust Kali’s safety if their response to a critical failure is ‘it looks like it broke’?  That seems unacceptable to me!

In the year that this has transpired, Kali has lost their advantage in the ‘higher protection’ helmet market. The POC Octal is still around, and its ‘look’ is much more accepted than it was before, while the price has dropped a bit. Smith and Giro both have road helmets with MIPS (Smith with the Overtake, and Giro with the Savant MIPS) It seems like perhaps Kali is no longer a contender, and quite frankly, maybe it shouldn’t be.

UPDATE!

This post was originally published on Jan 13, 2015. As usual, I tweet and link to new blogs posts from Facebook, Google+, etc. I did the same with this post, and the same day I had a reply to my tweet from @KaliProtectives, saying:

Hey Darren, we just read through your review. Could you DM me us email and we will get you sorted (for real this time)!

Interesting. Public bashing seems to be the best way to get a response!  I responded the next day, via DM:

Kali; You’ve already got my email, right? But just in case, it’s ****@***** Would love some explanations…

Again, the same day, this reply from Saris Mercanti at Kali:

Hi Darren,

My name is Saris and I’m the marketing coordinator at Kali Protectives. I read your review yesterday and am very disappointed you had such a crummy customer service experience. Due to the way we have our distribution setup, we are not supposed to send product to Canada from our US office, but I want to make sure we get you (or any of our customers) properly taken care of.

Could you please let me know what size helmets you ordered? The Aero/Winter covers are size specific. I have your address from your email chain with Steve Hays, and will get covers and a new retention system shipped right away.

Regarding your issue with the broken retention device, we have seen it before – but it is not common. We’ve warrantied roughly one retention system for every thousand of those helmets sold.

If you have any further questions about our technology, please feel free to call the office at 888-Pro-Kali and ask for me.

– Sincerely,

Saris

Good! Someone with authority to do something! I’m not sure what the ‘normal’ failure rate is for safety gear like helmets, but 1 in 1000 seems…not ideal to me. However, at least it’s a response to the question. And it sounds like Saris is going to make things right, so, there’s that! My response, also on the 14th:

Hi Saris,

The helmets I ordered were both Small/Medium sized Phenoms.  I appreciate you sending me the covers, but am still curious why the covers were not included with either of the helmets I ordered?

As for the retention system; I assume if you are sending me just that piece that it’s replaceable? Is it easy to do? Do I need any specific instructions?

Cheers,

Darren

And finally an explanation re: aero covers. Weird that it took so much questioning…

HI Darren,

The helmets you received were from the first batch of helmets produced, which were shipped from our overseas factory without the helmet covers included. This issue was not discovered until some helmets had been delivered to distributors, who may not have verified that their inventory was affected. We have not (note: I’m assuming this is an unfortunate typo, and Saris meant to say “now”)  added an additional quality check at our warehouse, to verify that every helmet that ships now includes all of the listed components.

The retention system is very easy to replace. You just need to pull the old one out, and the new one will snap right into place.

– Sincerely,

Saris

Interesting. I suppose it would be difficult to later distribute the aero covers to everyone who purchased a helmet; but it’s definitely something that should have been caught before it even got to that point. To me, that sounds like a lot of folks got missed and will likely never have an aero cover.

Then, on the 25th of January, this shows up for me:

Handwritten letter

Two replacement retention systems. Two aero/winter covers (they do exist!) and a brand new Kali Maraka helmet in red and white!

I responded:

Saris,

I received your package today. Thank you kindly for addressing my issues re: the aero covers and retention systems. The inclusion of a Maraka ‘on the house’ was unexpected! Thank you!  I’ll be sure to update my website with this latest experience.

Cheers,

Darren

So, I’ve replaced the retention system on my Phenom, and have a backup in case of another failure (hopefully unlikely) and an aero shell for both Phenoms we own now. The addition of the Maraka was unexpected (and unnecessary!)  I’ve resumed use of my Phenom, and the winter cover has come in handy on some of our recent cold Snirt (snow covered dirt) road rides this spring. I will certainly continue using the Phenom until it’s old, and I think I’ll use the Maraka as my ‘around town’ helmet.

UPDATE #2!

On September 29, 2015, I received the following email:

Hi Darren,

I am the owner of Kali Protectives. I am writing you because I just saw a review you did over a year ago about us. I was totally bummed. Not because your assessment of the Phenom helmet was inaccurate, to the contrary, it was accurate, the fit system is not what it needs to be on that level of helmet. I was bummed because of the lousy customer service you received. I am not writing you because you do a blog, I would (and do) write any customer that has had a bad experience. Thankfully there has not been that many. I strive to empower my people to “make it right”. The two people that handled your case where both reassigned earlier this year to things that fit their strengths.

I would like the opportunity to make it right with you. I do not care if you ever write about it, that’s not what this is about. Your assessment of the fit system on the Phenom was and is accurate. Our new aero helmet TAVA uses a BOA system. BTW, we put the Phenom in the wind tunnel, it didn’t do all that well with the aero cover, it works better as a rain cover. Next year’s Phenom will also have the BOA system and we are working on a retrofit for the ones we have in stock now. Anyone that currently has a Phenom will be offered the same retro fit.

Personally I hate it when things suck, but I hate it more when I am treated lousy. I offer my personal apology and request to try to make it up to you. I’d like to send you a retrofitted Phenom or a TAVA or both.

Thanks for your consideration.

Brad Waldron

Kali Protectives

I must say I was a bit shocked to receive this email, and to get such a generous offer, despite having already been ‘taken care of’ (eventually|!) After some consideration, I replied on October 13, 2015:

Hi Brad,

Thanks for this.  I appreciate the effort of you writing me. I’m pleased to hear that you’ve redesigned the retention system on the Phenom. I will say that I feel guilty accepting anything further from Kali at this point, as (eventually) I was well taken care of.  Your email and offer is much appreciated though! I certainly don’t think it’s fair to get another entire helmet. If you do come up with a retro-fit for the Phenom, you could send me one of those if you still wish (again–it’s really not necessary at this point!)

Cheers,
Darren Cope

Brad replied the same day:

No worries Darren,

I appreciate your comments on accepting “stuff”, I just ordered some items from Zoic, if I put that I am from Kali they know me as the owner and send it for free. I never want to be one of those swag grabbing industry people. So I ordered stuff and incognito. It just feels better.

The offer I gave you is an offer I would give anyone that has not been treated to my satisfaction. Maybe you’ll give me another chance someday. Otherwise, just enjoy the ride

Thanks,

Brad

That has been the end of our conversation, and I have not received any further product from Kali. I’ve been wearing the Phenom ever since, and have started wearing the Maraka daily on my commute to work. Luckily, I have yet to have to test them in a crash, and aside from the retention system issues I discussed above (which Kali has now apparently rectified) I’ve been happy with the helmets. I’ve attempted to give all of the facts, in the order that they occured to be as fair as possible. As such, I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide what to think here–clearly some things were dealt with poorly initially; however, is the follow up enough to rectify that? I was very impressed with the response in the end, but it sure took some fighting to get to that point.

NOTE:

This post was originally called “Review: Kali Phenom Helmet – aka Why to never buy a Kali Protectives Product” Some of the commenters below suggested it was perhaps a bit too strongly worded. After some more thought, I suppose they are correct. I’ve renamed the title of the post to make it more fair to Kali.

If you’ve ever used the excellent Atlas functionality feature in QGIS, you know that you can make some very nice map books (‘atlases’ in QGIS parlance) with feature-driven layouts, titles, styling, etc.. This functionality is becoming more and more advanced in recent releases. Yesterday, I was working on an atlas, and wanted to label only roads and lakes that were within the currently ‘active’ atlas feature, rather than labeling all roads and lakes. With a bit of searching, I was able to find a solution that worked beautifully. I present it below in the hope that others find it useful!

In my example, I had an atlast with a ‘fade out’ so that features outside of my current atlas feature got ‘blurred’ until they became white. However, when I labelled my roads, all labels were showing, even in the otherwise white areas. This was not desirable, as you can see below:

Notice how the road labels show on the otherwise whited-out background

To fix this issue, I set a rule for the labels that looks as follows, where LABEL_EXPRESSION_FIELD should be replaced with the appropriate field name or expression that you want to use for your labels:

CASE WHEN intersects($atlasgeometry, $geometry ) THEN “LABEL_EXPRESSION_FIELD”  END

All you need to do is go into the label setting, and use the above expression in the “Label this layer with” expression field:

Label Settings Window showing how I set up the expression.

QGIS will then only label features that intersect (i.e. touch at some point) the current atlas feature. In my case, this gives the much more desirable results shown below. Note how the white areas no longer have labelled roads shown:

A much nicer looking map, with roads labelled only where they touch the current map feature.

Of course you can have a lot of fun with this doing other neat things as well. Hopefully this inspires you to create your own awesome atlases!

Today I found myself trying to create a ‘midpoint’ on a large shapefile line layer. QGIS doesn’t have a tool to do this, and because the layer was large, I really didn’t want to mess around converting file formats to stick it into a database. However, similar to my last post about Creating Points On A Surface Using OGR, I found a quick trick (via this question on gis.stackexchange.com) that also uses the awesome ‘-dialect’ switch in OGR. It works like this:

ogr2ogr OutputPoints.shp InputLines.shp -dialect sqlite -sql “SELECT AsText(Line_Interpolate_Point(InputLines.geometry, 0.5)),OTHER,FIELDS,CAN,GO,HERE from InputLines”

Simply replace “OutputPoints” with the desired output filename, and “InputLines” with the name of the line file you wish to create the midpoints from. You can change the “0.5” to any number you wish – it represents how far along the line the point will fall, so if you want a midpoint, leave it at 0.5, but if you want the point 1/4 of the way along, change 0.5 to 0.25.  If don’t specify fields where I have “OTHER,FIELDS,CAN,GO,HERE” you will get only a point file with no attributes. If you include other field names from InputLines.shp (comma separated) after the closing bracket, OGR will also return those attributes from InputLines.shp.

Here’s a quick visual:

Lines With Midpoints

Bonus assignment: rather than making an intermediate point layer, let’s just write the lat/lon of the midpoint directly to the attribute table:

ogr2ogr OutputLines.shp InputLines.shp -dialect sqlite -sql “SELECT *, X(Line_Interpolate_Point(InputLines.geometry, 0.5)) as X, Y(Line_Interpolate_Point(InputLines.geometry, 0.5)) as Y from InputLines”

 

I put together a quick screencast showing the Search and Filter capabilities of Golden Cheetah v3. Check it out!

Golden Cheetah has a multi-function Search and Filter box in the top right-hand corner. By default, Golden Cheetah starts with the Search function enabled. This is indicated by the word Search… in the query box, and the presence of a magnifying glass icon. To switch to Filter mode, simply click the icon, and it will change to a funnel icon, and the query box will change to read Filter…. Naturally, clicking the Filter Icon will then toggle you back to Search mode.

The Search tool allows you to do a ‘free text’ search. It will search for the term(s) that you enter in any text (but not number or date) field. Use Search to find a word or words that you have entered somewhere in an activity.

Examples:

• To search for the word mountain anywhere, enter mountain
• To search for the exact phrase “massive hill”, enter “massive hill” (notice the surrounding double quotes)
• To search for either the word massive OR the word hill, enter massive hill (notice the lack of quotes), or, alternatively, enter massive OR hill
• To search for both of the words massive AND hill, but not necessarily as a phrase (e.g. the phrase massive hill climb would be a valid result), enter massive AND climb
• To find the words cyclocross and cyclocosym (or anything else starting with cyclo,) use an asterisk as a wildcard by entering cyclo*
• A single letter wildcard is also possible, using a question mark. For example, to search for Brazil or Brasil, enter Bra?il

If you’ve ever had to create a point on a polygon surface, you fairly quickly realize that there’s a lack of easy tools that will perform this task. Almost every desktop GIS package will create a ‘centroid,’ but that doesn’t work when you need to find a point that’s guaranteed to fall on the surface of your polygon. Below is an example of two polygons that will work fine with a ‘centroid’ tool, and two that will cause the resulting point to fall off the surface of the polygon:

Example Polygons

Running the QGIS “Polygon Centroids” tool on these polygons gives the following results:

Centroids – Notice how the top right and bottom results are incorrect.

Of course, many of the more advanced GIS packages (PostGIS, SpatiaLite, etc.) have a tool for this exact purpose. However, the problem is that often those tools are overkill, or require you to convert your data format in order to use their nifty spatial functions. What a pain!

However, there’s an easy solution, and once again, it involves the heavy-hitter OGR , which never ceases to amaze me with its functionality. One simple command will create points forced onto the polygon surface, using the smarts of SpatiaLite, but not requiring you to convert formats or load anything into a database. Here’s all you need to run, from the command line (I suggest installing OGR via OSGeo4W if you’re on Windows):

ogr2ogr OutputPoints.shp InputPolygons.shp -dialect sqlite -sql “SELECT ST_PointOnSurface(geometry) from InputPolygons”

That’s it! The result is a point for each polygon, with it ‘forced’ onto the surface.

The resulting points, forced onto the polygon surface.

Cool eh? Observant readers will notice that all the OGR command is doing is actually changing it’s ‘dialect’ to sqlite, which allows you to pass in any SpatiaLite query. This of course opens up many of the other awesome tools available to you, right from the command line, with any file type. Perhaps I’ll post some other neat examples soon; stay tuned!