Scalable body armor concepts – mine 2¢

Personal armor today become a subject of an intense hype. Speaking about coverage, let’s keep in mind mobility. Especially, pelvic area is a challenge to designer. 

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One-piece soft clip for PALs attachment

It (five inches long) is compatible with specific PALs setup on the pouch – two-space-two, commonly found on Maxped pouches and some other manufacturers. See illustration:

Though, the longer version (7 inches) will be compatible with another PALs stup on the pouch, never found on any pouch: two-space-one-space-two. I’ll make some for testing purposes in future.

Poor man’s substitute for quick attach tri-glide buckles and for G-hooks

Poor man’s substitute for quick attach tri-glide buckles and for G-hooks

Driven by the idea to save money and simplify logistics, I made a pair of concepts of dirt-cheap analogues of quick-attach ladderlock buckles.

The task is – to connect two webbing loops (for example, attach/detach compression straps on the backpack)

The solution – cord loops, locked with

1) carabiner

2) the strap itself

Greyman armor carrier – stolen ideas recombination

As political tensions are becoming more intense, I again and again find myself thinking about sneaky/concealed/covert/discreet/plain soft armor carrier for “family and recreational purposes”.

My considerations were pretty obvious:
– holding two soft armor panels (any proprietary cut I can acquire)
– non-suspicious outer image, maybe even disguised as warwear
– easy waist adjustment
– fast ditch, maybe not so important in civilian application, but welcome anyway
– easy recover from ditching
– somehow controversial feature – an opportunity to attach mini/micro chest rig
– ambiguous feature – an option to insert hard plates

Plate carrier with warbelt – weight distribution, spine support

This is only a draft idea, but can’t contain it. Many similiar solutions already exist – Crye’s StKSS, Mystery Ranch BASE, Virtus system element, BCB load carriage yoke, TYR’s X-frame, TUR Gear PkDLCS. My idea is to make a drop-in addition to any COTS plate carrier and barely any warbelt to add a new feature.

Frame is installed into the PC in the way as danglers, hangers and lower asserory pouches are installed, and sits in the plate pocket. To the warbelt it can be connected via PALs or as drop-leg panels, with thw slots on the w.b., not sure, may be even both types for more stability.

Frame sits on the sides of warbelt, not on the back – for more freedom of movement.

Binoculars (chest rig) harness concept – Upper Torso Connection [binoculars], UTC-B

With all benefits of existing binocular harnesses (which also offer a good method of attaching mini/micro chest rigs), there are some disadvantages in their design.

Its straps become twisted – see picture below.

Mini/ micro chest rig harness concept – Upper Torso Connection [light], UTC-L

Recently I met in the internet two concepts of chest rigs’ harnesses, which I can describe only as “borderline genius”. So I was jealous as a devil and can’t eat, sleep and surf the web peacefully – until I figured a new concept combining both.

The main problem with my wanna-make chest rigs is the number of attachment points – as these rigs are supposed to be light, they have only four attachment points, not six, as heavier rigs do. So with six points its easier to both keep chestrig high (with upper and upper-side points) and anchor it on the waist (with lower-side points). It is far more harder with only four points, oh, so sadly to know.

After long hours of intense -h-a-t-e- research, I decided to make upper points of four-point harness to work as traditional upper points on six-point harness, and lower points of four-point harness as both upper-side and lower-side points on six-point harness.