Video Transcript
The AC0 is a slicked down upgrade from the AC1 that many of you guys are already familiar with. What you get in the bag is the plate carrier.
And what you will see is you have a slick cummerbund that has no cells for equipment. It is just one layer of polyelastic so it can hug really tight to the body. And I will also say it is very comfortable. It is probably the most comfortable cummerbund that we offer. It's just really nice because it can stretch quite a lot. You can get the carrier very tight to the body, which is good for concealment. But it's also just leads to a very comfortable experience. If you're running and sprinting and doing different things and you're needing to breathe a lot, well, this can actually stretch with you even if you have the carrier nice and tight. You will also see that the shoulder pads are a little bit different than the AC1. We've made it a little bit longer, but in this case on the AC0, there's no padding. It is essentially just a sleeve made out of Tweave materials. So it does have some stretch and it is a little bit comfortable, but we're trying to minimize bulk.
So if you do use this plate carrier in a sort of a low vis format, you're trying to wear a jacket over it. We're just trying to eliminate excess bulk. Plus what we found in our testing is if you're just throwing plates in here and you're not running an entire load out, you typically don't need a whole lot of padding on the shoulder straps. But of course you can always add an aftermarket shoulder pad of your choosing to the plate carrier and add that just fine. We've also changed the internals of the plate carrier. You'll see this Tweave material that we have went away from the mesh. This material is, it's a more premium material. It in some ways may be a little bit more comfortable. It doesn't have some of the sort of the pilling that can occur with the mesh material that we had. And it also allows the plate bag to stretch a little bit better as you are inserting plates, especially particularly large plates like level fours. So it ends up just being a much better experience for you guys on the inside. You will still see or on the backside or in the plate pocket, you'll still see we have a very generous field of loop, uh, hook and loop Velcro. This is so if you're running a, say a smaller size plate or something kind of weird, you have enough loop Velcro that when you go to insert the plate, you can extend the flap deep into the carrier, shoving the plate all the way to the top to eliminate slop. That's just something that I noticed with a lot of plate carriers early on. And when we started to design plate carriers, I wanted to ensure that we had a lots of loop fields so that those of you who are running different kinds of plates or maybe you want to run size, small plates in a medium are able to do so. And you're not constrained to only Velcro-ing it here at the bottom.
Well, let's talk about the front. So on the front of the carrier, you'll see that it is completely slick. We do not have an ID panel for flags and morale patches. So it does look a little bit cleaner if you are wearing this, say, underneath a hoodie, if you have to say a black one, you don't have this extra material sitting right here that can draw the attention of people to what you're wearing underneath your jacket or your hoodie. So we've eliminated the loop Velcro, made it completely slick. You'll see on the front, we've also deleted the Molle material or the webbing material for use with a Swift clip buckle or G-hook buckle. And part of the reason for that. And we talked a lot about this was, Hey, this is a plate carrier that you're probably not running tons of placards on and you know, massive load outs. This is meant to be a slick carrier. We wanted to remove that from the equation, but instead what we've done is we've added a row of Molle across the front sideways Molle. So it's still Molle spacing. And this allows you to attach a couple of different placards that we have.
In a format that is going to be much slicker than relying on Swift clip buckles or G-hooks. So you'll see here on the Molle flap placard that we have four little rows of webbing. And I'm sure you can guess how this works. These are going to get woven through the loops back onto itself. And it's going to sit very flat and you have no big buckles or anything happening here on the front. So we have the Molle flap, so you can add whatever pouches you want. And then of course we have the 5.56 placards. You can run three magazines and have a row of Molle in the front. And once again, we have all four of these strips of webbing and those can be woven through here. And that can give you a way to carry a little bit of ammunition and some other equipment. If you decide that's what you need.
Now the row of webbing here on the top is Molle space. So it's not proprietary in any way. It is compatible with Crye Precision placards, although Crye did do proprietary spacing. It's not full Molle. So if you do go to add a Crye precision placard to our webbing across the top, you are going to get it bunching up slightly in the middle. Generally that's not a problem once you put it on and the plate carriers being worn. Uh, but you will notice that it's not a perfect one for one fit, but it still works just fine with Crye Precision, ABS and CPC placards. The main recommendation that I would have for a plate carrier like this is running something like an elastic, shingle. So in this case we have one of our 5.56 shingles. It's got Velcro hook on the rear and loop on the front. You're going to throw this on the front of your AC0.
And then the cummerbund is going to sit directly on top, pulling everything nice and tight to the body. So if you aren't running magazines in the front, it's folds really flat. It's really small. It's very low vis. It's very, you know, very small, but then I can always add my three 5.56 magazines and some accessories on the side. If I chose or still choose to do so. And there's lots of placards out there that are similar to ours or shingles, I should say from other companies that hold a variety of different magazines. So definitely look into something like this or our 5.56 shingle. If you are running an AC0, if you want to stay extra low profile, but still carry a little bit of ammunition.
The upgrades that we made to the AC0, and this is the same as the AC1.5 is we added a five or six degree can't to the shoulder pads. This is just to accommodate more body types when it comes to comfortably wearing the plate carrier. A straight format works pretty well on a number of folks, but then when you have people that are a little bit more jacked or they have a little bit more just angles to their shoulders and their traps, that can be a little bit uncomfortable. So we added five to six degrees, which works on a ton of people. It is a more enjoyable and comfortable experience. So we have done that on the AC0 as well as the AC1.5. Now to adjust the shoulder straps, we're going to ship this in a pretty loose. Um, so I do recommend that once you insert plates into this and you throw it on, you are probably going to be adjusting this. The way you're going to do that is you're going to pull the Tweave sleeve all the way to the back is what I like to do.
And then you'll see I have access to both the front and the rear strap. And then I'm just going to re Velcro it to where I think I need to go, which in this case, I'll just go to the end. Cause I think that'll be right. I like to fold the webbing over to make room for the Tweave sleeve. And the Tweave sleeve is stretchy, so it can go right over, pull it all the way through and then it'll pop back under and then stretch it back out. And now I have this all adjusted. To insert plates, it's very straightforward here to come up into here, undo the plate pocket.
This case I have some medium M210s with a backer. Once again, pushing this all the way to the front to ensure a good fit and then just take the flap, tuck it on in. I like to make sure there's no wrinkles cause that can be kind of uncomfortable. One of the best accessories to throw onto an AC0 is wing attachments. So one of our civilian radio wing attachments or a wing from another company, there's tons out there that make them. They attach here to the front of the Velcro typically, and then they hang off the sides, the cummerbund comes around, and it pulls all the equipment nice and tight to the body. It can still be concealed very easily, and it's also very comfortable. So I have a few accessories here.
In this case, I have two of our civilian radio wings. So you could run your small radio on this side, have a tourniquet or something else, or radio on this side in a single rifle magazine. Cummerbund comes around, and it will pull all that nice and tight. If you wanted to run a tourniquet on the bottom of the plate carrier, it's easy to grab with either hand. You could always use one of the elastic tourniquet holders down here. Now if you want to attach one of our triple flap placards, or this would go for any company that produces a placard like this where you can remove the buckles and then have a tail that is used to attach to the buckle.
This will still work on the AC0. We're going to undo the one wrap for the buckle, removing the buckle. And then the velcro is going to hold this to most of the weight of the placard and how many mags you run. You can even throw six mags in here if you want. It is going to be held by the velcro. The one wrap up here is just preventing it from tipping forward and peeling off of the velcro.
There's not much weight or any weight being suspended off of this. It's just to prevent that peeling away. That can happen when you add a bunch of weight. But now I do have a way of building out my AC0 to have additional ammunition and other equipment. I can have my radios, I can have all my stuff, and then when I need to I can remove this. If you have any other questions about the AC0 and its compatibility with armor plates and other accessories on the market, go ahead and email us at [email protected].