Helmet Ballistic Test: WW2 Japanese Type 90 Steel Helmet

Hey everyone and welcome to another helmet ballistic test video. I am Mike B and I've got my little uh sexy Canadian cameraman Devin K working the camera. He's also going to be shooting with me today and we're going to be testing out the Japanese Type 90 steel helmet. So if you haven't seen this uh my video that I made on this a while back this isn't the helmet I'm shooting but these were the standard issue uh steel helmet for the Japanese Imperial Japanese army during you know before the second world war during and shortly thereafter for a bit. A lot of these also went to other countries that they were either occupying or bought these or somehow got these helmets like um Thailand specifically. This one is just the shell it's in you know fairly rusty shape. I know these are hard to get which we'll get to and talk about that but it's got these M1 style chin strap bails that are welded to it which indicates Thai service post-world war two. Also the paint and then the number and there's also just check that out really quick there's some stuff written in there which I'm pretty sure is Thai. Yep could be something else but I don't know. Yeah they got a lot of these as basically war trophies after Japan got kicked out they just pressed them all in the service. Right the Viet Minh used a lot of these uh the Koreans used these so a lot of a lot of countries use this post-world war two. Now we're gonna we're gonna talk about a couple caveats before you start frantically typing it out. Nice voice crack there that was beautiful. Um first caveat before you say we're I got an example that is not uncommon. I know the helmets themselves are uncommon but I got this particular example is not uncommon. It's not complete it would take a lot to restore it and like with all these pieces of history the information that we're going to get based on mostly curiosity out of this ballistic test is worth more as far as history is concerned should sacrifice one so that it answers a lot of people's questions so this is the only one so we get it like we're both helmet collectors we both have a passion for this I have a complete type 90 that I was looking for for years I understand this however we were also under the impression that because of the steel that this is made out of that it's going to perform fairly well against direct hits which we'll talk about as the second caveat so that's why we're doing these tests and if you still want to freak out about that and say oh we're pieces of shit we're destroying history that's on you at this point so now hopefully that that explains why we're doing this test it's it's a really cool thing that we're both curious about and we are for basically every helmet design ever made because we're both super passionate about military helmets around the world and we do get the historical significance moving on to the second caveat we do know and understand as collectors and military amateur historians helmets are not designed to take direct hits from bullets they're designed to stop debris that's flying around stop from bumping your head you know some shrapnel the actual balls that come out of the rounds that you know overhead bursts I was using the first world war and to a limited extent in the second world war not really made for fragments or direct hits high velocity stuff that being said as we've shown you over the past few years some of these helmets can actually deflect a lot more rounds than they're rated for or expected to do and some helmet designs that you know we thought would do a lot better did not do very well against direct hits which brings us back to the first caveat that's why we're doing this so we will get going now all righty so japanese type 90 helmet we're gonna shoot it with a 71 grain full metal jacket 32 acp did you hit right at the hole well there's the jacket so that's that's pretty bad right off the bat no but like what you know you hit the the front hole yeah the hole but look at all this damage around it but it didn't actually didn't go through but it cracked yeah wasn't that what the swedish helmet that's what the swedish one did this is apparently similar steel to the m37 so we're still alive but that doesn't bode well i think we'll see we'll see again they all perform different i also forgot to mention we're shooting at about five yards it's a really close distance because um i don't know mainly so we can actually hit it so you guys don't bitch and moan about our inaccuracy but it's also not an unrealistic close quarters pistol range for warfare fair and we don't have to walk as far because it's hot as **** out yeah so anyway this is a 9x18 macrov i should have looked at it when we were home what green this bullet this is i think it's like an 85 grain um something like that but it's just the tall ammo full metal jacket stuff out of the cv for bg82 did i hit it we'll find out i did okay it's glanced it glanced it like it's supposed to that's pretty good so that must have been just because you hit it at a really like on the very edge true or we hit it at just like where there was a bad patch of steel you know what kind of steel they were that's not even a that's a negligible dent that is so maybe this is just maybe this spot just had a little bit more impurities in it than that's but that's a design flaw in itself yeah having that weak point and there's a bunch of holes in this well those are new yeah but there's a bunch of holes in these including the bent holes on the top yeah all right interesting so right 124 green so now we're going to shoot this uh with a 124 grain full metal jacket out of a beretta 92 fs 9x19 9x19 yep okay that's right through it you can see where his uh eye used to be yep all right that's that's about it so a very irrelevant caliber and handgun that would have been used against this helmet in the south pacific by u.s forces is the colt model 1911 in 45 acps the 230 grain full metal jacket wow that or i didn't get hit we're good but like damn that's a lot of significant catastrophic failure it literally blew a chunk out of the helmet from the reverberation through it and we're running out of good spots to shoot it yeah that is nuts i know the metal was weak there already but like no you hit it pretty far away and then i hit it exactly almost on the 9x18 hit right yeah pretty close to it here let me just do it we're not doing we're gonna have the space for this because what if it blows this huge ******* chunk off we got we got the other side we've only got two left okay rolling yep all right we're gonna we're gonna take another shot just because i want to make sure this is accurate and not already shooting a really weak spot with all this energy so that that cut right through it yeah another pretty big catastrophic failure we got a lot of yeah that's that's not good at all sharp jagged edges stuck in the head uh the wearer is going to be completely completely and utterly screwed yeah we're done well on to the next one yep all righty so now we're gonna shoot the uh 762x25 out of it don't know the grain on this but it's the Romanian 80s surplus i have high hopes that it'll defeat this round yeah yeah right make sure you shoot above the dent from the 9mm oh that did a great job bounced right off bounced right off after going through his brain came right out the back too probably out the hole yeah so yeah that's that's typical does it have two chunks missing now no there it busted up up high there it came out yep that's fun yeah so now just for the sake of following through and being consistent we're not going to be doing rifles on this one because if it doesn't defeat a 9mm or even a 32 acp there's no point shooting it with a rifle but we could shoot with an m1 carbine just for fun we'll decide in a bit if there's anything left of it after this yeah keep watching but so this is going to be a 357 magnum 142 grain semi-wad cutter full metal jacket out of the ruger gp100 that's not good that doesn't bode well at all that also did a nice neat little hole basically damn broke huge flakes of it off anything out the back no probably tumbled down but yeah that's not a very good good helmet it turns out this is right down there with the french m51 so one of the worst we should wrap the video up we'll do our outro so uh as you can see already i'm not going to be touching this it's razor sharp well not razor sharp but it's damn sharp uh this is not good this is probably the worst helmet one of the worst helmets that we've tested it didn't stop any once it deflected the uh find a place where it's not gonna poke it deflected the 9x18 but it uh didn't do anything 32 acp cracked it completely the first 45 destroyed the front cracked it all open the second 45 punched right through it which usually they'll they'll do some damage like you know dent but they'll cave it in but they don't usually don't penetrate unless the steel is not good now this could have been a bad batch of steel this could have been you know in a fire or something like that who knows what happened uh so maybe in the future i'll be able to get another one of these but they're very expensive even just for just the shells but this is probably one that i want to revisit just to confirm because usually when they're really crappy like this we try to make sure we do another one in the future just to make sure it's the steel in the helmet not just a bad match so not good at all i'm very surprised by this to be honest i expected it to do a hell of a lot better simply simply did not so with that being said bringing up the cost of this which was like well over 100 bucks this is like almost 200 bucks for just the shell um this was made possible because people support me on patreon and they're channel members so if you want to see more cool videos like this and possibly be able to afford another shell like this in the future to confirm if it's really crappy or if this particular one just sucks that's a great way to do that um also subscribe to devon k's channel the link to that will be in the description and the link to my patreon will be right below that um so five bucks a month or more on either platform gets you into my discord server which is really fun there's a lot of really cool people on there it's pretty interactive there's actually quite a few people on there now which is really fun but anyway that's a cool thing that's a cool perk and it helps us be able to do videos like this which are not cheap to make but they're really fun uh if you can't support the channel financially but you still want to support devon and i you can just like this video subscribe to both our channels and share this video that's a great way to get the word out this is going to be an interesting one for people that on the internet have said for years well the japanese type 90 was one of the best helmets of world war ii because of the steel that was made out of the design blah blah blah well maybe for debris and stuff like that but you can obviously see from this particular one not the direct hit so sharing this video is you know really good too for um getting the word out and if you don't want to support us you're just kind of like yeah you guys kind of kind of suck and i don't want to do that well you still supported us by watching the video so thanks to everyone who watched and we'll see you on the next helmet ballistic test video