Helmet Manufacturing: Brodie Steel to ABB Robots

A modern helmet is a hard shell, a foam liner, some padding and a strap. Making millions of them that all pass the same impact test takes a lot of careful factory work. This post is about helmet manufacturing, from the pressed steel helmets of the First World War, through leather caps and the first fibreglass and foam shells, to today's factories where machines mould, cut and paint shells while people still do much of the finishing. We look at where robots already work in helmet plants, where ABB robots could fit, and what is still hard to automate.

A white full-face motorcycle helmet with a clear visor. Photo: Ashley Pomeroy / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How steel, leather and fibreglass helmets were made

The British army had no steel helmet when the First World War began. John Leopold Brodie, a Riga-born inventor working in London, patented a design in August 1915. Its big advantage was production: the helmet was stamped from a single sheet of steel, so ordinary presses could turn out huge numbers. About 250,000 were made by early 1916 and the first million by that summer. The Type B switched to a harder steel with 12% manganese, suggested by Sir Robert Hadfield. By the end of the war some 7.5 million had been produced, including 1.5 million M1917 helmets for American troops.

A US plant making steel helmets for soldiers in the First World War, in a photo filed in February 1918. Photo: National Archives via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Pressing the bowl was only the first step. Photos from American helmet plants in early 1918 show rows of heavy presses, stacks of steel blanks and bins full of shells. Workers then hammered down the edges of the rims by hand so the rim strip would hold, fitted the liner and strap, and painted each helmet. Apart from the pressing, each step meant a person at a bench handling one helmet at a time.

Workers hammer down the edges of steel helmet rims at a US factory, early 1918. Photo: National Archives via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Sport helmets took a different path. American football players wore leather caps for decades, and racing cyclists used open helmets of rubber bars covered in leather that stopped scrapes but did little against a hard knock. In 1954 Bell made its first production helmet, the Bell 500, with a polyurethane foam liner inside a hand-laminated fibreglass shell. Bell's Star of 1968 was the first full-face motorcycle helmet on the market, and its 1975 Bell Biker brought a polystyrene liner to bicycle helmets. Around 1990 makers began moulding a thin shell straight onto the foam, which allowed bigger vents.

A leather football helmet from around the 1930s. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Inside a helmet plant in 2026

In September 2026 Autocar India toured Vega Auto's plant in Belagavi, Karnataka. The company has capacity for about 9 million helmets a year across six facilities. Shells are moulded in house and cut out with a CNC water jet, and the top floor makes fibreglass and carbon fibre shells. Vega says it has tripled its composite capacity since 2020, partly for the Axor MX Carbon off-road helmet. The reporter found many steps more labour intensive than expected. Visitors in August saw each shell inspected and sanded by hand, and the graphics applied by hand too.

A close view of a cracked bicycle helmet. Photo: Andrew Kvalheim / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Paint shops are one place robots have already moved in. In 2020 Dürr installed a ready2spray paint robot at HJC, one of the biggest motorcycle helmet makers, in Yongin, South Korea. It sprays basecoat and clear coat on full-face helmets, handles more than 20 colours on one line and, according to Dürr, saves up to 30% of the paint. That robot is not an ABB machine, but ABB builds paint robots for the same kind of work. The IRB 5500 paints car bodies, and ABB's smaller paint arms coat plastic parts in explosion-protected booths, as described on our ABB robot use cases page.

ABB paint robots working on a car body inside a paint booth. Photo: ABB

Other helmet steps match jobs ABB robots already do in plastics plants. Thermoplastic shells such as polycarbonate come out of injection moulding machines, and ABB arms like the IRB 4400 and IRB 1600 are used to unload parts from moulding machines and place them on conveyors. Trimming, sanding and polishing a shell edge need steady contact pressure, which ABB offers through its force control software on arms such as the IRB 1300. We have not found a source saying a helmet maker uses ABB robots for these steps, so for helmets it remains a possibility.

An ABB IRB 4400 unloads parts from an ENGEL injection moulding machine in a Spanish plant. Photo: ABB

Where helmet factories go next

More of the line will probably move to automation, starting with the dirty and repetitive jobs. Sanding dust, paint mist and resin fumes are the first targets, because robots take workers away from them and make every shell the same. Composite shells are harder, since laying up carbon or fibreglass by hand is slow and skilled work. Cells for cutting, sanding or painting can be planned and tested in RobotStudio before a plant buys hardware, which lowers the risk for a smaller helmet maker.

An ABUS bicycle helmet with a built-in rear light on show at Eurobike 2024 in Frankfurt. Photo: Matti Blume / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The helmets themselves are changing too. Bicycle and motorcycle helmets now carry lights and intercoms, so a helmet line looks more like electronics assembly, with cables, batteries and small screws to fit inside the shell. Small arms and cobots such as the IRB 1300 or GoFa CRB 15000 can handle that kind of fitting. Industrial hard hats, made in very large numbers, are a simpler job for the same moulding and packing automation.

A yellow safety helmet, the kind of hard hat made in large numbers for building sites and factories. Photo: Wasiul Bahar / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Several problems are still open. Many helmet plants run in countries where labour is cheap, so a robot has to beat a skilled sander on cost, and helmet makers change shapes, sizes and colours often. Every helmet still has to pass impact tests, and a robot that sands too much off a shell edge could leave a helmet that fails one. Plants will also need people who can program and maintain the robots, and in many helmet factories those skills would have to be trained from scratch.

An ABB IRB 1300 small industrial robot with an operator holding the FlexPendant. Photo: ABB

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