Video Transcript
This is the new version of the AC1 plate carrier. As many of you guys are aware, we've been offering the AC1 for a few years now. We have moved tens of thousands of them. And in the process of selling all those units, we've been collecting various updates and upgrades that we should make to the next version. Because one of the goals here at T.REX ARMS is improving our products as we go and not just letting them sit there and become stagnant and antiquated. So this is a slight upgrade from the original AC1. Hence why this is called the AC1.5 and not necessarily the AC2 or the AC3.
When you open the package, the plate carrier is going to be all folded up. The cummerbund is already set to a certain size. It may work on some of you guys, although I do recommend sizing the plate carrier to yourself once you have your armor plates and you're good to go. And as you see, the plate carrier already has the shoulder pads installed. The two SwiftClip buckles for attaching your various placards and different accessories to the front. And shock cord pull tabs on every single cell of the cummerbund. All three of the small, medium and large cells all have shock cord and pull tabs on each cell to help retain your equipment.
Now going over the features for this. One of the main changes that we have made to this plate carrier from the AC1 is a new cummerbund design that comes with the plate carrier by default. So rather than having a four inch cummerbund that does not have retainers for the equipment that you put into the cells. By default, all of the AC1.5 are going to have pull tabs and shock cord already installed. You just have to adjust them to a different length based on the kind of equipment that you are using inside of the cell. But everything can be retained right out of the box.
You will also see some webbing that is located here above the loop field on the front. This is molle space, so there are some placards and other pieces of equipment on the market that will be compatible with this. And we will also be creating placards that are compatible with this row of MOLLE. But essentially the way it works is when you have a placard from us, or if you have a few that are coming out, you're going to have four rows of molle that are positioned here on the back side.
And they can also be used with the SwiftClip buckle or with a G-hook if you are interested in using one of those attachment styles for the front of the plate carrier. But if you want to eliminate excess bulk and remove the SwiftClip buckle, remove using a G hook, basically what you do is you take all four of these suckers, and you thread them through the molle on the front. Then you're going to pull each of these all the way through. I will say it's easier to do without all the equipment on the placard. And now your placard is firmly fused to the placard itself. It's not going anywhere.
And I can now remove these SwiftClip buckles. I'm not going to need them anymore. Another upgrade to the AC1.5 compared to the original AC1 is larger and thicker shoulder straps. So the original AC1 had a very small shoulder strap that looks like this, with a single layer of a padded material on the inside of the actual sleeve itself. And for most applications, this was enough padding. This was enough protection around the shoulder straps that are adjustable that people are fine and they are good to go. But when we were looking at the plate carrier and realizing that people are loading this down a little bit more, we decided, hey, we should probably make the shoulder straps longer so there's more surface area that is being padded that is touching your traps and your shoulders.
And we're also going to add an extra layer of padding, which does make these quite a bit more comfortable. So you'll see right here that it is an extra inch or so longer, an inch and a quarter or so, which does make a pretty big difference. And it is also thicker with the two layers of padded material. Another thing that we did to improve the plate carrier is we adjusted the angle of the shoulder straps by five to six degrees. So on the original AC1, they were perfectly straight. On most body types, this is perfectly fine. It's not a problem. But when you have people that are a little bit more angled or they look like they were chiseled by Michelangelo himself and they have more traps, then you actually want to have shoulder straps that are angled slightly so that you get a little bit more comfort. Too much angle and you can run into other issues. There are some plate carriers that angle the shoulder straps quite a lot. So we settled on five to six degrees as that would work with most people and is an upgrade compared to the old AC1.
Now, in this case, when we shipped the shoulder straps, they are already fairly loose. So if you're a larger individual and you're just girthier and you're bigger and you're tougher and meaner, maybe. This may be sized perfectly just fine. But for most folks out there, or even just for myself, I already know I'm going to need to tighten these down to get the plate to ride a little bit higher. The way we're going to do this is we're going to grab the shoulder sleeve and we're going to push it all the way to the back. This is going to expose the end of the adjustable shoulder strap. So now all I have to do is take this, peel it up, and now I can set the height. And the big thing here is that I have moved the shoulder strap all the way to the rear of the plate carrier. I don't want it going anywhere. And I'm going to go ahead and make an educated guess. I've done this many times though. And I'm just going to move this all the way to the end of the Velcro.
Now what I'm going to do now is I'm going to double over the shoulder strap so that I can fit the padded sleeve over it. And I'm just going to work that over. I'm going to pull it all the way to the front. And at some point this is going to expose the bunched up shoulder strap that I just adjusted. I'm going to grab that, pull it all the way to the rear, flatten it out, and then flatten out my shoulder strap. And I have now effectively tightened down the AC1.5 shoulder strap. The key feature to the AC1.5 that is different than many plate carriers on the market and is definitely different from the original AC1 is the loop field behind your placard, which is typically used for mounting your various wing pouches, such as radio pouches or trying to get carriers.
Typically your attachments will sit on top of this, like so. Your placard goes over it. And occasionally as you're donning and doffing your equipment, your wing accessories like to come off with the placard and it just becomes very annoying. Or depending on how heavy of objects you have in the wing accessories, they may actually peel off completely if you have a very large radio or some other piece of equipment. So what we decided to do was, hey, let's actually make the wing accessories a major part of the design for a plate carrier like this because they're so popular and so many people are using them. So there's an additional field of loop Velcro behind the main field. So when you open up the plate pocket to insert the plates, this whole thing is actually going to peel away. And in this case, the cummerbund is tucked under there. We'll just go ahead and release it.
And this is where you're going to mount your various wing accessories. So in this case, I have two of our civilian radio wing pouches. You could also use pouches from anyone else that has Velcro hook and loop like this. I'm going to position those where I normally like them, kind of up high. I can then shut the main field. I can now insert my plates.
In this case, we still have on the AC1.5, just like on the original one, a generous amount of loop field on the inside. So there's many plate carriers out there that will have a very small amount. It was appropriately sized for a certain size or type of plate. And the downside to a design like that is if, for example, you decide to run size small plates in a medium carrier and you're trying to extend the flap up into the carrier to get the plates high in the carrier so they don't slosh around and move around, you can't because you've run out of loop. You've run out of loop field and that's just not very convenient. So we have a very large section of loop here. We have a large section of hook here as well to help secure the plate. So you can fit small plates into a medium carrier and eliminate the slop or other sizes of plates, other weird sort of anomalies, just so that you guys are more supported in the equipment that you use. So we're going to tuck that up in there. You'll also see that we have changed out the material on the inside from the mesh material. That does work quite well but also can fray and have some other issues with the very popular Tweave material. It still allows stretch to occur as you are fitting plates into here. It also seems to be more comfortable, although some of that may just be some placebo effect.
Comparing the two designs, they are very similar in comfort as far as on the actual body of the carrier itself. But the material is a higher performing, better performing material and that's why we made the swap to this right here over the mesh. So now that I've shut the plate pocket, I can now, when I go to put the carrier on and I want to throw the cummerbund up underneath the front placard, when I peel the placard away, the wings are protected. They are housed inside. Now all I have to do is place my cummerbund, however it happens to be, based on what I am wearing and how much tight I want it. I drop the placard and I am good to go. So now you don't have to worry about your wings having issues as you are donning and doffing your carrier, swapping placards. They are just tucked away permanently more or less. You can always take them out but they are just there hanging out doing their thing like they are supposed to do. The cummerbund on the plate carrier, you will also notice is a new type of material. So this is a polyelastic. It's a little bit more comfortable than the other elastic that we have been using. It also gives you a little bit more structure and rigidity to the entire cummerbund.
It also doesn't have sort of the crinkling effect that can occur on the top edge over time. So again it is just a higher performing or better performing material which is why it may be adjustment to this. The downside is it does not come in printed patterns so you are not going to have a color matched cummerbund with your multi cam plate carrier, M81 plate carrier. It is going to be a coyote or some other substituted color that matches that camouflage pattern. But again the quality of the material is what is important, not necessarily the camouflage pattern that can be achieved on the plate bags. The majority of the plate carrier can be that camouflage and this right here is just going to be a solid tone polyelastic.
You will also see that we have maintained the same form factor from the original AC1 where we have a small cell that can fit a pistol magazine or similar sized accessory. A 5.56 size cell that can fit, you guessed it, a 5.56 magazine or something similar like a radio. And then the rear cell is still the very large size cell that can fit a 7.62 DMR type magazine. But it was actually originally designed to fit something like this ITRK vacuum sealed medical kit so I can have some medical tucked away instead of having a large pouch somewhere else. Now you will see that the main change that we have made to this is we have inverted the rear pouch to be upside down.
And this is just from a lot of testing when you have a rear pouch on a cover bond especially if you are wearing the carrier high back here it is very hard to access. You are not really getting the stuff out of there, you may actually have to have someone do it for you. By inverting the pouch and having a pull tab it is very easy to get back there and pull out a pair of gloves you have stowed back there, a med kit or a med tray you have stowed back there. It is much more intuitive, gives you more options and it is just a better product all around. Now just like on the other cover bond you can swap these and then have the 7.62 pouch angled upwards if you are creating a dedicated sniper or DMR load out. And what that is going to do is that is going to then position these two cells in the rear upside down so then you will have your small that is upside down, your medium that is upside down and then the large pouch will be oriented upwards for your rifle magazine such as a Scar mag or an SR25 magazine. To adjust the overall size of the plate carrier in terms of width, so how large or how tight you need this to be, you are simply going to go into the rear pocket of the plate bag, lifting it all the way forward and this is going to reveal the cummerbund, how it is interfacing with the plate carrier.
These can now either be loosened or tightened to your heart's content however you need to do it. Typically speaking most people will probably loosen it. We have also adjusted the size on the cummerbund slightly, you will see these two cells over here. We are just adding a little bit more length to this so that you don't necessarily have to run it all the way out as many people have been doing. This also provides stand off when you are running wing attachments on the front of your plate carrier so that your small individual pistol pouch or multi tool pouch is not sitting directly on top of your radio wing. It is tucked back a little bit more and it is a little bit more comfortable. Once we have sized this how we want to, we then take the rear flap and shut it. I can now insert my rear plates to the carrier itself such as a double mag or some sort of medical kit you are going to be mounting that to the loop feel that is inside the plate bag and not on the loop feel that is directly behind the plate bag like you would do on many other carriers. So you are just going to mount whatever it is, your double mag pouch or your bed pouch it is going to be mounted right here in the actual plate pocket itself.
To adjust the pull tabs it is very simple. There are knots on all of these. You are just going to loosen or tighten or substitute a longer shock cord if that is something that you need to do and then just tie a knot and you will be good to go. The last feature that I want to cover and this is very slight but it is worth mentioning when we were redesigning how placards and attachments are used on the AC1.5 one thing we wanted to do was help optimize how G-hooks are used. There is lots of companies out there who utilize G-hooks for different placards that can be used instead of the SwiftClip buckles. Do they just want to get away from the bulk of having a big buckle on the front? It gets in the way of your PTTs and your other communications equipment. And on the original AC1 because the loops were very wide when you would go to mount a G-hook it could slop and move around more than I typically liked and probably more than most people liked.
To combat the G-hook dilemma we have sewn the webbing slots for the SwiftClip buckle with a space in the middle. So now instead of just having the two slots that are very long and wide which fit the SwiftClip buckle just fine but make the G-hook dance all around. Now the G-hook can either be placed at the bottom, in the middle or at the top and isn't going to be moving all over the place. So that is just to help you guys who do prefer and are using a G-hook style attachment system. The downside to this is it does look maybe a little bit uglier than just the standard design that so many people do. And it does make adding the SwiftClip buckles back into the carrier, it does make it more difficult because it is just a tighter fit. Which also means it is harder to be removed and come off inadvertently. But it does make it a little bit more annoying. Which is why I recommend removing your plates and possibly also your placard when it comes time to add SwiftClip back onto the plate carrier or even to possibly remove them. To insert the SwiftClips you are going to do the long end all the way you will do top to bottom. That didn't seem so hard. This is the hard part. When it comes to mounting various pouches on the front of the AC1.5 you of course can mount them directly to the front such as a wallaby pouch. Then your placard will go on top.
A Spiritus sack pouch. Something very similar to this. Or even our Med-H. But another thing you can do which makes the form factor a little more streamlined is you actually mount these to the inside in the plate, rear plate, in the front plate bag. And that's actually going to make the item sit much more flat to the carrier itself than being all the way out here and then tipping inwards. So I definitely recommend you play around. The other reason to house it inside of the actual plate bag itself is again when you're donning and doffing the carrier now you're not having to fight the Velcro from your dangler pouch as you're removing your placard. Just like you're not having to fight it with the two radio wings or wing attachments that you might have on the sides. So that's just a little pro tip if you want to have just a more seamless process of putting on and taking off your plate carrier. Just mount the stuff in the plate bag and you'll be good to go. If you have any questions about our AC1.5 and its compatibility with other products on the market, go ahead and email us at [email protected].