Beginners Guide to Body Armor

hey guys today we're going to be taking a look at everything you need to know about plate carriers and body armor [Applause] in this video i'm going to be going over a bunch of things that i think are important before purchasing your own plate cure and body armor i'm gonna try to go over as many things as possible and give you guys as many tips as i can now this is a video that i wish i would have had when i first got into getting play cares body armor because when i first got into it i bought a really cheap plate carrier just thinking i knew what i was doing and i regretted it because it wasn't very good so i bought a little bit more expensive one but still cheap and i ended up getting rid of that one and getting another one and so on and so forth until i started finding good stuff that i actually really liked and found out that really worked and started listening to some other people so hopefully this video will be able to help those that either already made that mistake or save you from making that mistake here in a little bit now disclaimer before we start i am no professional or expert when it comes to body armor or play carriers this is just from my personal experience the things that i have found i'm not a military guy i've not been in combat so i have not worn these in combat in any situations like that this is just coming from the thoughts and things that i have personally found so take it for what it is i don't want you to think that oh hey this guy knows what he's talking about because he's done this this or this there's a lot of really good information on youtube from guys that have worn this kind of stuff in combat and know a little bit different on that aspect but this is just from my point of view the things that i have found as being a civilian wearing this and using this and basically having these protect myself and my family so take it for what it is and i will get right into the video so currently i'm testing three different plate carriers uh this is one from hrt i really like this one this one's got a ton of really cool features which we'll go over here in a little bit and then i've got this one from ace link this is a skeletac one it's a really lightweight carrier as you can see because it's got these holes basically and this is also an acelink one as well this is kind of more of a basic carrier and i've been testing all three of these i also have a couple other ones i've got this one here from ar 500 i believe i got that was one of my first ones that i got that isn't really the best but i want to go over it and then i have another one in my truck but my dad has my truck right now so i don't have that one here for filming um but that one's another one that i kind of wish i would have never bought but it's a lot kind of like this style but this one has a lot nicer features than that one did so let's just dive right into this so one question that gets asked a lot is accessories how do you mount them uh people have questions about placards things like that mag pouches what to use what not to use and the first thing that i'm going to say is every play carrier as you can see from these ones that i will have set up everyone is different they all have their own different style and how they're set up and that's going to be completely personal preference i know that's kind of a cop-out you know answer but it's true anything you want and what you see as your mission set or what you're going to be using this for whether that be law enforcement civilian use military you need to know what you need and what you're going to be using and what you want to personally use are you going to go for light weight because you think that i'd rather be fast than be able to have a bunch of gear and be slow and easy target or do you think oh i want to be able to have enough gear on this thing front and back so if something happens i get stuck back in the woods for a day i have enough stuff to survive so those are the things that you're going to have to ask your own questions and answer for yourself so you know exactly what you want to get me personally what i did is i set up a couple of different carriers this is kind of my late weight one if i really want to do something quick go in get out and not plan on being anywhere along this is kind of my long time you know if i'm going to be out for a while plan on being out in the woods for a long period of time or i might have a couple days stay this is what i'm going to go with so i have a couple different things set up so with your front plates your mag carriers and things like that with your attachments so the first thing you're going to be looking at that's kind of your normal and your average right now and was always kind of the the go-to is just your molly which i'm going to turn this around so you can see there's nothing on the back of this one this is just going to be your normal molly ones this is kind of what the normal cheaper everything's going to be really generated towards because that's really what all the accessories have so you just have your molly if you don't know a ton about molly i don't want to go too deep into it but you basically just weave it in and out of this and it attaches to it so if you if you have questions about molly not sure what it is i'm sure there's other youtube videos on it gives you a really detailed view on what molly is but basically it's just an attachment system that most carriers have it's a really good useful attachment system it's kind of annoying to attach but it does work and obviously it's been working for years because that's what you know military and law enforcement has been using for a long time so this is what normally you're going to have so you can just buy whatever attachment say you want to buy one mag carrier you can attach it right there moll it on and it'll be right there you can put it wherever you want where the molle is or you can do i want three where this one i have three of them on here so i have three mag carriers and each one is separate by itself and they attach to the molle wherever i want if i want this one to be a little bit higher i just go up one molly segment and i can attach it a little bit higher and for some of you guys that are a little bit more in depth that know about mali and know about certain things i'm gonna get more detailed into this but i want to make sure i'm trying to cover this for everybody maybe somebody that doesn't know much about the molly i want this video to be an all-around basis for anybody that is just getting into it or knows a little bit or knows a lot but wants some questions answered so right now we're just going to go over the simple things later down the video we're going to go over more detail on other things like that so bear with me uh so the molly is very simple you just attach it where you want it so this one just has some very simple mag pouches nothing crazy to it so the next thing that you can choose is the placard system which i personally think is a far superior system just because of the ease of use and the fact that you can rotate things very easily so i'll explain that to you real quick so first you're gonna have these two clips both this one and this one have the placard system as you can see has these clips here and then what you're going to be able to do and it's really cool is you can just take these clips off like that and then you can just pull this down and it just velcros on so basically it has velcro right there in the back and then you've got your clips right here and right here so you need to slap it on clip it on and you can basically rotate whatever kind of placard you want on this depending on what you're doing so you can really just buy one plate carrier and just rotate placard so if i want something with more gear and more stuff i can use this one but if i just want light weight i can switch to this one so i can just slap this one on and have a little bit lightweight set up so that's the placard system it's not really new but i feel like that i get a lot of questions on because people are kind of confused when i talk about the placard and how you can switch it uh people really aren't sure exactly how it works so as simple as taking those things off pull it down put a new one on it also confused me when i first started getting into it because i just thought molly was the only option i didn't realize there was another option so this one also has a plastic system so i'm going to pull this one completely off so you can see exactly what it looks like without so basically there it is you've got your velcro right there and then i can honestly take this placard and slap it on this one as well clip it in and then i can be fine but you don't have to if you don't want to if you want to keep it all the same color but it's kind of cool to know that other placards from other companies can work on other people's plate carriers you're not stuck with just one so if i want to uh i don't really need mags i really just want a plate carrier and be really lightweight i can just take this off put my mag somewhere and run this only or if i'm like you know what i really want my mags back on you can grab them on your backpack or your truck slap it back on clip them on and you're good to go so hopefully that makes sense it is a really big benefit if you're going to be getting a plate carrier and you're choosing between something with placard and molly and i'm sure the placard is going to be more expensive definitely choose this i just think that that's a really big benefit being able to switch right now you might be like oh i'm just going to run three mags i'm going to be good i'm never going to run anything else i'm fine but if you ever do change your mind all you have to do is spend 50 on this instead of spending 200 on a whole new plate carrier so i think it's definitely a benefit and there's perks to going that route and i don't really see any downfalls to going around other than i can't maybe adjust these high or low or something like that it has to stay right here in the front which that's kind of where you want it anyway another thing that you can do here is have these little mag or pouches so things that i put in these are like multi-tool flashlight i've got a knife in this one and a like glass breaker i haven't finished installing everything of this one so i'm going to have like paracord fire starters little things like that and then obviously in the back i have two pool away medical pouches medical is very important to have so it's just good to have little things like that this one also behind the placard which is cool so you pull the placard away and then i also have the separate pouch that also just velcros in this one's for a tourniquet so i can put my tourniquet right there which i usually run but i had it in another video and i didn't put it back and then i also have a mag slash radio holder on this side so those are other little accessories you can buy just to have a little extensions to it because i don't want to i don't really like putting too much up here i like kind of keeping this free you can put some things in here you can velcro some things on that or you can molly as well up here on either of these so there are a lot of different accessories you can do so again when it comes to what you want on yours that's all going to be personal preference do you want just one mag do you want three mags me personally i want to have three mags on it it can fit on there so why wouldn't i want 90 rounds opposed to 30 rounds with me i think that's important this one has two pistol mags here this one has two pistol mags there and this one has two in the front probably get two more here i just haven't purchased those ones yet and this one has three the biggest benefit with these tacos is these can fit any mag so i can do ar ak i can do flashlight glock i can do cz scorpion so tons of different options with those tacos those are really really nice high speed gear pouches are expensive but they are really nice i definitely recommend those if you're looking for something like a buy once crying once and never have to buy anything again so we went over the molly we went over the placard system let's go over the straps something you want to look into uh is either what you want a quick detach system where you can pull off uh here and then you could do one that doesn't have anything like that where you can't pull and this one here has a quick pull so you can just basically pull this and this whole thing drops so you can do a couple different styles depending what you want i like this one because just one click and you're good and you can swim your way out of it the benefit to that is the fact if you happen to be in water you fall underwater you wreck your vehicle in water or you're just doing something in water this is going to weigh you down and you're not going to move and the chances you being able to unclip everything and pull over your head while you're panicking are pretty low so with these these ones you can literally just pull pull and it falls off or you can pull the bottom ones when they fall off this one you can just pull out and swim out of it another benefit is just actually putting it on it's easier you don't have to like try to put your head through and everything you can just clip that clip it around and put it back on so it's just a little bit easier to put on and off but those are two big benefits there might be other reasons for this i don't know those reasons but those are the two reasons i know so for the straps here your shoulder straps this is actually really important some people don't even think about this but this is a super important feature when you're talking about body armor so you've got a lot of different styles so this one's really minimalist this one's kind of thick and bulky it's got a lot going on this one's also pretty thick and then this one is a little bit thinner so one thing you're going to want to look at is you want to have a little bit of padding because wearing this and having that weight of the plates on you it's going to really dig into your shoulder so having something with a little bit of padding is great you don't want something where it's just like a thin strap like this and there's some that have that it's just a strap they want to think you know it's minimalist but it really gets uncomfortable it digs into your shoulder so you want to have some kind of padding to disperse that weight a little bit and give you a little bit of comfort now there's a really fine line though between getting padding and too much padding because if you go too much you're going to be affecting your shouldering you're going to be affecting other things like that anything you do with that shoulder you're going to have so much padding there that when you go to shoulder your rifle it's not going to sit on your shoulder it's going to sit either half on the padding or all on the padding or a weird mixture of both so getting something with thinner padding is really important this one is really good this one is good because either even if you do touch it it's still very thin uh this one's a little bit too thick for my liking and this one i haven't had issues with when i first seen it i thought that's going to be really thick and have problems personally i didn't have an issue with it but i think it's because when i'm wearing it it almost shifts over a little bit so that one moves a little bit more but you don't want to go too thick so definitely keep an eye on that now a couple key features not all of them to have but the hrt does there is a two panels right here and there's a channel or a tunnel right here in the middle and basically what they did with that is they gave you a little bit of airflow so when you're wearing this it's obviously pressed against you it's going to be hot you're going to sweat but with this there's just a little bit of space that it's not laying against you that it gives you so airflow can get through obviously it's not going to be like ac or anything it'd be cool you down but it definitely does get an airflow through or the other day for a couple hours it was 84 degrees and obviously i was sweating but it was nice to have that airflow so even if anything you can look down and blow down and kind of get that hot air out if you've ever wear plate carry you know exactly what i'm talking about it's just super super hot and uncomfortable in there that's just one way they kind of look to mitigate that a little bit another little feature that you want to look for with shoulder straps is these here these are for either radio cable management or water management if you have a water pack on the back you can have your water management that is important because if you're going to be doing longer stuff and you want to have water with you it is good to have these i think almost every single one of them have them for the most part as far as i know this one doesn't for the most part most of them have that but it is just something a nice little feature it's not a make or break i don't think in my mind unless you're just getting one plate carrier for everything i think it definitely is something you want to look into but it's definitely a nice little thing to have if you're going to be wearing a water pack now for the back a lot of them have these pull tabs that's just so somebody can drag you if you're down they can pull you easily this one doesn't have it this one does so they all for the most part have those pull tabs this is a really minimalist one as you can tell because it's just a really thin piece of plastic trying to keep it as lightweight as possible but for the most part they'll have this pull tab that's a little benefit just because if you go down you want something to pull and be able to carry you now backing on these are different this one like i showed you before it's kind of hard to carry these things around it's just molly so again you can add whatever you want you can add medical pouch a big giant pouch you can add nothing and you can put it anywhere you want so that's gonna be personal preference with these two here which is really cool is they have this zipper here in the back so it comes with this little back panel it does have laser cut molle so you can put your molle on there if you want to but you take this zipper and you zip this off and you can take this whole back panel off and run nothing you can run molly or you can zip this on and have medical and things like that or you can have like say i have a medical pouch on this one unzip it take another one zip it back on and you can run different things say you want a helmet pouch or different things like that so you can really have a personal preference with this being able to change depending what kind of situation that you're going to be in so this one has the same style but this one's a little bit better in my mind just for the fact that it has it separated so that one has one long zipper this one has two small zippers so what's cool about it i actually unzipped this one already is you have two separate ones so i can have this top one and the bottom one different so say i always want to run medical which is something i always do want to run so i always want to keep these ones on but i just want to switch this out maybe i want a different kind of pouch i can just unzip this top one take the top one off take another pouch put it on top and zip that one on and never have to move my medical or have two medical or three medical depending how many back panels i have so that's a really big benefit speaking of medical i think that's a huge very important thing to have on your plate carrier some people think that oh you know it's a little bit more weight maybe i don't want to it's expensive to go medical supplies so important have gauze wraps tourniquet things like that be able to stop a bleed be able to do quick medical obviously most you're going to do a ton of medical if you don't have a lot of medical knowledge i plan on keeping like a saline bag some iv supplies in here so if you're losing fluid you can get an iv it depends on your training level though if you're not trained on things obviously your setup might be a little bit different but that's just kind of what i plan on running back here so i have all my medical stuff right here in the back and these pool tabs are pretty cool because you can literally just take that and pull straight out and then you have your medical so i always plan on having one side as always just me no one touches it just for my person and then the other one is for hey jimmy's down takes my medical back on the right side they pull and go and they have some medical supplies this one also has a medical pack on the back that you can get access to and have all your medical supplies so definitely an important thing to have on your plate carrier so again this back part completely up to you what you want to put on but i just want to show you the differences between the molle the zippers and the double zippers so cool features on both of them there might be some other stuff out there but those are the ones that i've had experience with so those are kind of the key features with the actual plate carrier itself obviously you're going to want to look at like sizing there's the different size plates which we'll go over here in a little bit i got a bunch of different plates sitting here that we're going to go over this one has level four ceramic and polyethylene plates in it this one has level three polyethylene this one has level three steel so they're like hard and then this one has level three plus polyethylene and ceramic plates so it does get expensive that is one of the biggest downfalls i think that plate carrier is a very very important thing to get especially nowadays and the things going on uh if you don't have your rifle and pistol set up and the things that you really really need like ammo guns i don't think it should be the first thing you purchase but i definitely think this should be a close second third maybe four thing that you should get because having the protection of body armor uh in some kind of situation like that that you might be getting shot at is huge so it's not a must i don't think that the person with body armor versus the person without because there's benefits without having it because you're a lot more agile you can move quicker you can do a lot more uh without body armor but the protection is huge so i definitely recommend getting something like this just don't make sure don't make it a priority over your primary rifle don't be like okay i can buy the i can buy a site mark and put it on my gun or i can buy an eotech or i can buy a plate carrier and armor get the good stuff for your gun make sure your gun set up body armor is going to do nothing for you if you're getting shot at and you can't accurate shoot somebody because you don't have your rifle set up properly and have the good equipment that you need so make sure your guns are set up you have enough ammo and those things are squared away and then look into purchasing these and getting something that's quality and good and that's gonna be worth your money so hopefully that helped you if you have any other questions about plate carriers accessories and things like that that i didn't touch on please shoot me a comment i will try to get you that information as soon as possible if i get enough questions maybe i'll do another video but i will definitely answer your questions and try to give you the right answer if i can't i will direct you towards somebody that can so now i want to go over body armor real quick i'm not going to do super in depth because uh this can go on forever so there's a lot of different plates body armor levels that you can get this is a three and this is a level four so what is the difference in how do you tell they look pretty much identical uh basically there's things in the back and when you purchase it you'll be able to pick this one's significantly lighter and this one definitely has some weight to it this one is is like nothing this is just polyethylene this has ceramic and polyethylene in it i have a video on me testing these polyethylenes i'll link up here if you want to see it is a really cool video this is literally just plastic little tiny thin pieces of plastic all stacked together and squished together and compressed and it stops bullets it's pretty crazy how it works so definitely recommend looking at that video this one has a ceramic plate and then it has the polyethylene so it's a little higher rated so there's a chart here i'll show you that kind of gives you an idea on what these all stop this is like your 556 762 if you've got the three plus which is in this one that's a little bit heavier that has a ceramic plate in it it stops you're a little bit higher around and then this four stops i believe it's it's rated up to a 30 out of six i believe don't quote me on that but i'm pretty sure it's a 30.6 and uh that's pretty impressive what all these can stop i'm actually going to be doing a video on this one soon shooting and testing it and then you have your hard plate uh this is gonna be a steel plate this is a level three plus so you're going to be able to stop those higher rifle rounds which is nice you definitely want to have something that can stop rifle rounds you don't want to go soft armor in my mind just because i would rather have something like this that can stop at least rifle rounds or the fours or three pluses now what you can see between these two is this one is super super thin this one's pretty thick what you can't see in video is weight this is very very heavy this is not this is i think three pounds this is definitely definitely bigger than three pounds very heavy especially when you have two of them one thing i noticed when i ran this on this carrier with nothing on it it is just the same way as wearing this fully loaded mags and carrier so these are significantly heavier and that is going to be a downfall this can stop a lot because it's a steel plate and you're not going to have some of the downfalls is this but that is something to look into is the way it definitely does make a difference now something to look into as well is storing this in your vehicle some of you like to carry plate plates or body armor in your vehicle i'm one of those people i also carry in my vehicle because i think it's important to have i used to carry polyethylene until i found out that heat and polyethylene don't really mix that well if you leave this in a hot place for two months or a week or two weeks for a long period of time the plastic it might get a little bit soft and might not be rated nearly as high so i leave steel plates in my vehicle and polyethylene in the house and if i have to go anywhere i'm taking these that's not to say that if you're going out for two days and you're in the sun it's going to weaken your body armor and it's not going to work that's not the case it's just if you're leaving in a vehicle and it's 90 degrees out for three weeks it's probably going to weaken a little bit just because of what it's made out of so definitely if you're leaving your vehicle i always keep steel plates in my vehicle and then these are at the house ready to go next thing i want to mention is going to be size as you can tell there's two different sizes this one is going to be 11 by 14 this one's going to be your 10 by 12. so if you're a smaller person like me i'm 510 and i'm not a huge big guy so this plate works perfectly for me it covers what i need it to and i still have movement i could run this if i want to it's going to cover a lot more but it's going to limit my movement a little bit i don't like that so if you're a bigger guy weight wise thickness wise you might want to look into the 1114s i recommend finding someone that has them or going to a shop that has these and looking for yourself because there is a pretty significant difference between these two and it is going to make a difference so again there's a ton i could talk about with body armor i just want to give you guys a really quick download of that i think the main body armor i would go with is something like polyethylene absolutely love it the weight difference is huge and i think it matters a ton so i definitely recommend polyethylene if you're going to go with body armor there's nothing wrong with steel plates other than the fact that they're heavy so i mean if you have these and you're like i can't afford anything else you're still gonna have protection you're just gonna be you're gonna tire out a lot quicker than the next person so i will be doing a video review on each of these carriers this carrier will get its own review and this carrier will get its own review here soon once i'm done testing them i haven't tested them long enough to be able to give you guys an accurate idea i'm gonna grab this gun just because i like to have something in my hands and i think it looks sharp if you guys want to get your own or if you guys have any questions anything that i did not mention in this video that you have questions about please ask me down below i would rather be able to answer those questions and help you before you make a purchase and possibly make a bad purchase and waste some money so that's why i try to make these videos i try to be able to give you guys information go off of mistakes that i've made or even just give you guys some information maybe you haven't thought about and again i'm not a professional i don't do this for a living with with body armor and stuff so i don't want you to think that you know i'm i'm i'm trying to pretend i'm somebody i'm not i just want you to give you a little bit more information and hopefully this helps somebody make a better decision so if you guys have any questions shoot me a comment down below also i always answer my dms on instagram if you guys want to have a little bit further of a conversation it's easier to do on something like that so if you guys want to purchase your own i can't link any of these things because youtube doesn't like that but in the description if you want to help out me and the channel things i do there is patreon and there's a link to my website from there you can go to other websites like brownells cloud defensive air precision anything you purchase using my link gives me a small kickback and shows those companies that generate flow which helps me out a ton it's not not a big deal i just appreciate you guys being here liking share and subscribing thank you guys so much i appreciate you all another company that supports me a ton is howitzer love these guys they should take five percent of proceeds and donate it to charity which is super cool because they donated over 200 000 to charity last year and i love their shirts they're super comfortable and their designs are pretty cool so if you guys want to check them out there's a link in the description for them as well

Channel: Tactical Advisor

Views: 1,620

Rating: 4.9036145 out of 5

Keywords: body, armor, beginner, beginners, guide, plate, carrier, help, new, plates

Id: Nz5gl71QadQ

Length: 23min 43sec (1423 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 01 2020