After a few weeks, a couple of thousand miles, a hearing test and a chat with an ENT consultant I thought I'd update my findings. ENT, for anyone outside the UK or who doesn't recognise the shorthand, stands for ear, nose and throat and a consultant is a high end grade of hospital medic in the UK health service. In my case I was using the ear part of his skill set.

I started off using the DIY moulded earplugs as my plug of choice. After the previous report I had a week or so of local running around on the bike using a variety of helmets before heading off to the south of France on my 125. Over the course of that week a couple of things were noticeable. Firstly the moulded plugs were so much easier to put in / take out than foam disposables. They go in with a kind of rotatory motion almost as though you're screwing them into your ear. With a little practice this just takes a few seconds each. With one of my helmets (a more close fitting one) though I started to get some pain in my right ear in particular as though the helmet padding was putting pressure on the moulding. After half an hour this became noticeable, particularly when taking the helmet off. I've never had this with foam disposables using that helmet and my conclusion was / is that there was slightly too much material in the moulded plug. Cutting down on the amount used for moulding - or taking a Dremmel to the existing one, would mean less pressure. I didn't have time to do this before departure so I used a slightly looser fit helmet instead.

Over the next few days I was quite happy with the moulded plugs. Compared to the occasions when I rode short distances (on and off the ferry for example) without them the noise reduction was substantial. They remained easy to fit, they stayed in place over time and generally worked well. However, even with the looser fit helmet I was still getting some ear pain in my right ear and I decided one morning I'd go back to one of the two sets of (no name) disposable plugs I'd brought with me.

Properly fitted into my ear canal these were a revelation. I could hear almost nothing. All the wind noise vanished and the engine sounded more like a vacuum cleaner than a screechy two stroke. All I could hear was a kind of electric motor humming noise somewhere down around ground level. Even the annoying occasional fingernails on the blackboard squeal from my back brake sounded acceptable. How sensible this is is a different discussion but there's no arguing that they work extremely well.

There are other downsides to foam disposables as well as not being able to hear anything at all. Firstly you have to fit them into your ear canal and not just shove them loosely into your outer ear. Fitted like that they hardly work at all and are nothing like as good as the moulded ones. And that's the problem. You fit disposables by rolling / squashing them into a thin sliver and pushing them into your ear canal before they expand back out again. With a new pair you have maybe five or ten seconds before that happens. You can reuse them but each successive time they expand back faster and after somewhere between half a dozen and ten uses they expand faster than you can get them into your ear canal. That's when you have to replace them. Somewhere around use four or five onwards you can still get them in but only if you're quick / concentrating etc - and even then it can take three or four (or many more) attempts. That's the point at which you shove them in as best you can and leave them. Yesterday I was trying to get an over used disposable into my right ear while keeping an eye on a skip lorry reversing towards me in a carpark. Would I get the plug in before I had to get out of the lorry's way. Well, no. There's no way you can concentrate under those conditions so I just shoved it in as best I could and rode off. The moulded ones would have been a much better choice at that point (except I'd left them at home).

Conclusions - the disposables are much better at noise reduction but there is an argument that they're too good (not one I subscribe to but I know others do). They are however more difficult to fit - particularly if you reuse them. On a bike trip you're really going to have to reuse them unless you have the space to take a crate of them along with you. Blocked up ear canals also gave me some some adjustment problems (i.e. pain - a bit like having a cold) when changing altitude rapidly in the Alps. Moulded one are not as efficient but they may be good enough and they're much easier to use. Just watch out that you don't make then too big so they stick out from your ears. I suppose a professionally produced pair would take these points on board and through experience, better materials or whatever may produce something closer to the efficiency of the foam disposables, but they'll cost.

So how good do they need to be? How much noise is damaging? A few days ago I had to visit my local hospital for a periodic hearing checkup (about 10yrs years ago I damaged my left ear when a gun was fired too close to it). The hearing test came up with the same results as usual (normal right ear, slight reduction in my left) and I discussed ear plugs with the consultant. His opinion was that, from a hearing protection perspective, zero hearing as with the foam plugs is probably more than you need. A combination of a decent helmet and something like my moulded plugs would be fine. So that's what I'm going to go with. I'll have another go with the moulding gloop and see if I can improve things - but I've also ordered a box of disposables from eBay just in case.