Steel Body Armor VS Armor Piercing Ammo

hey what's up everyone William here with ar-15 calm so today we're gonna test a prototype body armor plate it is gonna be going after a level 4 NIJ rating so you're looking at some 30-odd 6m to armor-piercing ammunition here and m1 garand to fire it out of and what we're gonna do is try and test a hybrid steel / ceramic body armor plate so kind of preface this a little bit because I'm going to show you this contraption now and it's gonna look a little strange to you basically I've got some marks on there we got the plate in a plate carrier I got some marks on there to aim at you know to try and get six evenly spaced hits and one of the things that the company this is from tactical scorpion gear that makes this plate and one of the things that the company wanted me to do was to build a much more rigid base much more rigid gizmo tuck the plate - you guys know a lot of times I'll just clamp the plate to a block and just let it rip or maybe we'll put it on a punching bag or whatever but they actually asked me to use wood behind it and try and hold it like really you know in place so try to be a little crafty and just use you know stuff that I had laying around so I just strapped this well I use a couple of ratchet straps to go through the plate carrier to this pretty heavy piece of wood and I just strap that to a milk crate and threw some weights in there so hopefully this will keep it from moving around too much and then you guys can kind of see the plate is really up against this board right here this whole thing may shatter and blow apart the first time I hit it it's very awe-inspiring the last time that I tested one of these we actually did this before with a plate that had a thicker steel core and it was pretty heavy it was almost unrealistically heavy it was like 10 maybe a little bit over 10 pounds now that he's made the core the steel part behind it thinner so before it was basically a ceramic layer on top of a level 3 you know quarter-inch plate which you know will stop 308 and you know some five six rounds but it was just really heavy unreal I think unrealistically heavy so now the core is thinner wouldn't stop 308 probably on its own but it's got the ceramic in front so it lightened the plate up a lot I think this one is closer to about eight or nine pounds I haven't gotten the official final weight on it yet but um you know we're gonna go ahead and test this prototype and then kind of see how it goes I already did it with a thicker steel core on my channel on the wound Channel and it stopped five these rounds 5:30 at 6:00 a.m. - armor-piercing rounds and the only reason that the sixth one went through is because the ceramic was all shattered up and the place that I clamped it broke that part of the ceramics I didn't I didn't actually have like you see these white dots I didn't have six good places to shoot it but it still its top five and for the NIJ test you don't have to stop one so I'm very curious to see if this thing can do it so let's get the contraption set up on the table load up the m1 garand clip don't get to say that too often will let up the m1 garand and then we'll just take some shots and see if this thing can hold up to the I mean I'm telling you it is a GoPro footage kind of explains it better than I can those rounds hit really hard so let's get it set up and take some shots so I'm not even gonna pretend like my shot placement was on point because it was unfortunately not mm-hmm however um let's see what happened may not be the easiest to get back out considering I strapped crap out of it honestly shooting at plates in a plate carrier makes it a lot harder especially because you can't see where the first shot you took ended up so it makes it harder to adjust we definitely had some go through I do remember that one of the first ones I shot was right here so I'm curious to know oh well yeah that's very interesting you can see what that one's actually stuck in the wood wow that's pretty amazing so a couple of them that went through went through like look there's the tip a couple of them that went through cuz I noticed that like when we pulled this out it looked like it was trashed but the back of the thing is fine like the back of this thing so several of them that went through did not go through the wood but they did go through the plate which means that it's got to be pretty much right on the edge that's kind of amazing I've never had that happen before in a test you know I would have thought that if it went through the plate it would have blown right through this big piece of wood looks like we had two that made it through the wood but I don't know four or five of them made it through the plate it's pretty interesting little bit better look at the back of the plate you can see this is the metal not nearly as thick as a level three plate would be alright so this is pretty interesting I cut down the side of this and the bottom of it you can see all this pulverized like ceramic down there but I'm kind of a look at the tiled pattern on the inside of the plate there's a example of one of the hexagon shaped ceramic tiles you can sort of see the steel plate a little bit better and see what's really going on because like I said this thing is a complete mess and it makes it very very difficult to really tell whether it's stopping the rounds or not all right so here's kind of a better look at the inside ceramic layer it's pretty it's pretty much glued to the fabric pretty well see that strike place there it's glued on pretty well here's a closer look at the back of that ceramic stuff and this is easily the most difficult to post-mortem test that I've ever done very confusing and it's kind of a weird you know how the plate behaved but so this is probably one of the most telling shots so that one you can see obviously smashed through the ceramic hit the plate hard enough to break it to break a very big piece of it out dented it in pretty deep but did not go through now maybe some of its kind of squeak through that little seam there in the middle but that one didn't punch through and then we have other examples like this one and this one for sure where the bullet did cut through at least one of them passed all the way through I mean I saw pieces down inside of the milk crate so it definitely went all the way through so definitely not gonna stop six shots so to me it looks like it stopped about three of them I know that it stopped this one because we can see that I know that it stopped this one because that was a first shot we can see that too one of these I think the first one of these was probably stopped and then the second one is the one that smashed through the plate and then looks like - over here both went through though because up on this part of the wood higher up on the wood there's two holes in the back of the wood so both of those went through so I think they're pretty close on this I think the construction in the craftsmanship of the plate is actually very good you look at how many of those tiles are still there in place and obviously having the tile pattern helps a lot but you look at how much of that's still in place and everything and and really how overall how well the plate held up you know that that's pretty damn good especially for the types of rounds that we were putting into it I do think that the core maybe just a little bit too thin I'll try and zoom in here a little bit so you guys can see how thin it is I don't know that this kind of arrangement is going to work without the full size level three type of core because it just seems like you know the I don't think the back face would be too bad if you were just doing one shot what's gonna happen is even when you hit it like this on a very fresh spot it caves this big part in and it puts these cracks this hard steel is so brittle it's gonna crack like a lot even just from one hit that it stops and when the next one comes over and then now you've got a compromised plate you start to run into trouble so I think that the the core and the full-size one and then the full weight one that we did before it just had a little tiny marks on it I mean the one that punched through at the end punch through because the ceramic was gone but the ones that it stopped it looked like it was hit with a just a 308 ball around I mean it just it just stopped them so I don't know maybe if you just wanted to do a one shot you'd probably be okay I think this arrangement would work to pass the NIJ test with one round which I don't know maybe what that's what they're gonna go for but if you wanted to have a true multi hit like a four five six shot level four plate in there like with this kind of construction I think you would want the full weight you know steel core in there you know I take responsibility for the shots not being perfectly placed out but I do think we still learned some good info here it is a little bit more difficult to shoot plates that are in a carrier because I mean I tried to put those marks on the outside not that I really hit him that well I try to put those marks on the outside but you know it still kind of makes it tough because you don't always hit precisely you know where the mark is and then you kind of want to keep the shot spaced out and yeah it makes it kind of hard to do so anyhow if you guys have any questions about the plate I'll put a link in the description to tactical scorpion gear you could check out their website to see all the different types of armour and steel targets and other level four plates and they already have certified you know do they offer and then just stay tuned for more updates on this we'll do some more testing I'll let you guys kind of know what comes of it I don't know if they're gonna go with a thicker core and just deal with the weight or if they're gonna go to this and try and get maybe just a one or two hit rating or something like that drop any questions that you have in the comments and I just want to say thanks for joining us here on our comm this is William signing off

Channel: AR15.COM

Views: 6,686

Rating: 4.1932774 out of 5

Keywords: steel body armor, armor piercing ammo, ceramic body armor, body armor test, kevlar, kevlar test, kevlar vest, tsg body armor, tactical scorpion gear, ar15, ar-15, ar15.com, arfcom, body armor, steel armor, 30-06, ammo, ammunition, 30-06 body armor, ar15 vs body armor

Id: wM_vkgBVQ0c

Length: 10min 21sec (621 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 15 2018