DFNDR Armor Testing & Review Best Lightweight Body Armor

Hey everybody, how's it going? It's the Daily Shooter and every once in a great while I'm lucky enough to get a product that absolutely changes my mind about an entire industry. In this case, I'm talking about body armor Specifically Defender armor. This Defender armor plate right here has changed my mind about wearing body armor. Now to be honest I probably don't run my body armor as much as I should and the reason for that is my current setup uses AR-500 level 3 steel plates that weigh almost 9 pounds apiece. So total front and back is almost 18 pounds and that's before the rig, before the ammo, before the magazines, accessories, water bladder, and anything else. You're starting off at almost 20 pounds. So with this I'm saving 13 pounds front and back total. Two and a half pounds in the front, two and a half pounds in the back, five pounds total for the body armor. So when it's 110 degrees outside and I'm doing run of guns or I'm doing drills I can still afford to have this on without having to worry about a heat stroke. Now another great thing about this armor is you also don't have to worry about spalling. I'm actually gonna run the test that you're gonna see here in just a little bit and only about 30 feet away from the target. There is no way you could do that with steel body armor. Even with the Paxon coating or other coatings that companies put in order to prevent spalling, once that takes multiple rounds the coating tends to fall off. And so after the coating falls off you lose that protection and subsequent rounds will lead to excessive spalling. So this plate right here is designed not to throw anything back to the shooter. It's also designed not to have anything fly up. You know standard spalling, if you have your neck right here and the armor gets hit, you can have spalling come up in your neck. It can go into your arms, any extremity basically that's in front of the plate, which could be a big deal. So I'm gonna shoot this at 30 feet. I feel completely safe about doing so and it's also designed to absorb that kinetic energy. It has this really nice soft squishy foam kind of material on the back, which standard steel armor doesn't have, and that absorbs the hit. So instead of taking a hit right here and feeling it instantly on a steel plate like you would normally, this actually will take a hit right here and the entire plate will absorb that kinetic energy as it makes contact. So that's something else that we're gonna be looking for. Instead of having a steel plate that looks perfectly undamaged on the back, I want to see a little bit of bulging and a little bit of material elsewhere other than just where it's gonna hit right there. It just shows me that it's absorbing the the energy of the round. So let's go ahead and get to it. I'll show you guys my setup and exactly what I have planned and we'll see how well this does. Okay, so I'm out here in the Mojave Desert with the Defender Armor and what I'm gonna do is shoot it several times with multiple types of 5.56 and 2.23 rounds, ranging anywhere from the standard XM193 5.56 ball ammo to a little bit more exotic rounds like this PDX1 2.23 that has a split core. Each one of the rounds that I'm gonna shoot it with has different characteristics. Some of them range anywhere from 2500 feet per second all the way up to 3500 feet per second with the Hornady Superformance. You have a range of full metal jacket to hollow point, soft point and ballistic tips. So here's my setup. What I'm gonna do is I am going to strap the body armor to this bale of straw and use that as a backstop because it's 80 pounds, it is soft but still firm enough to represent a human body because I don't have ballistics gel and now I'm just gonna take some test shots. This is what the range looks like. Just gonna make sure that I can get it nice and zero because I want to get precise shots on this nine and a half by twelve and a half inch plate. Okay, so here's my final setup. I have the plate strapped to the straw and I'm using one inch repair dots from a shoot-and-see target to make my pattern. First up, we're gonna have the Fiocchi 2.23. It's a 55 grain full metal jacket, just a standard round and it's gonna hit top left dot. And I hit it exactly where I wanted it to and I'm really excited to get downrange to see how this turns out because I've never shot armor like this before and I'm really surprised. I mean it really absorbed that round well. It's just a standard 2.23, so I mean that's kind of to be expected. But as I turn the plate sideways, you can see that it's just barely sticking out. This is soft two and a half pound body armor and just a little bit of deformation in the back. Okay, so this time we're gonna step it up just a little bit and shoot the XM193 55 grain full metal jacket 5.56 round, second dot down from the left. And again, I hit it exactly where I wanted to so I'm really happy with the shot placement so that we know we're gonna get accurate results here. And again, just a little bit of front strike face deformation where it absorbed the bullet. But that kinetic energy really seems to be dispersed. It's not destroying the plate every time you hit it and you can see from the side there it just sticks up just a little bit and very little back plate deformation as well. So you can see right there just a little bit of a bump. So excellent results so far. Okay, so now I'm gonna switch it up and try something that I don't think I've ever seen used on body armor before and that is a 50 grain varmint tipped .223. It is a little bit lighter at 50 grains than the other two rounds that we tried, but it's traveling quite a bit faster. So I was interested to see what the results might be. And you can see right there same front face deformation and on the back it made minimal bulge. So you can see just a very minimal bulge compared to the .556 and the .223 above it. But you know, I was kind of curious to see how that would work out. Now we're gonna move over to a 60 grain .223 Winchester PDX Defender that has a split core and a hollow point. It's traveling about 2750 feet per second top right. Now this round I was curious to see what happened. It's a little bit heavier, still traveling pretty fast, and you can see that it barely made a bulge in the front whatsoever. It didn't crack any of the material around it, just the spot where it hit and on the back a minimal bulge again as well. So very little damage to the plate. Now we'll move on to the heaviest round of the six, which is the Federal Fusion MSR. It's a 62 grain soft tip round, so expect a little expansion when it hits the plate. It's still traveling at 2750 feet per second out of the muzzle. You can see right there pretty much does the same damage as everything else. There really isn't much difference. I mean this plate just absorbs it like it's nothing and you can see there again just a small dent on the back. I've shot this five times so far with five different rounds, and they've all made pretty much the same amount of impact on the plate, which is very very minimal, and the plate still feels extremely solid. Now I saved the fastest round for last. This is the Hornady Superformance. It has a 53 grain VMAX bullet that's traveling out the muzzle at 3500 feet per second. We're gonna shoot it on the bottom right corner here and take a look at what it does to the armor. Now first we're gonna go ahead and scan over all of the other shots that we've taken so we can have a quick comparison here, but you can see the first three, four holes, five holes that we put in this armor that still looks solid. The sixth hole pretty much looks exactly the same. So it didn't matter how heavy the bullet was, how fast it was traveling, or where I shot it. The results came out almost identical every single time. So that says something about this armor. The video speaks words. I could not say anything right now and show you guys exactly what's happening here, and you would understand that this is a very capable armor, and you can see there's no spalling. I only use little one-inch straps to hold this on to the the bale of straw, and the straps are in perfect condition. I didn't have to worry about anything flying back at me. I'm only 30 feet from the target. I didn't have to worry about anything, you know, cutting my straps. If you have extremities like your arms, your legs, your neck, whatever it is in front of your armor, and you take a hit, this is going to absorb all of that kinetic energy and not send anything into your face. Now that I've put six different rounds in six different locations on the plate, what I'm going to try and do is take this XM-193, which is the 55 grain ball ammo, and shoot three rounds rapidly center mass, and see if that has any different effect on the plate. Whether or not it penetrates the plate or just extremely damages the plate, that's what I want to see. So you can see I have two rounds that pretty much hit on top of each other. One that was a little bit of a flyer, which was my fault, but still we have a couple rounds center mass on the plate, and I was really surprised at the overall result. It handled it excellent. We have a total of nine rounds in this plate so far. Remember, this is just a soft two and a half pound plate, and it took it great. We have obviously a slightly larger bulge in the dead center right there, but no penetration. So here's a look at our body armor with nine rounds in it. After being shot from only 30 feet away, even 3 8-inch AR-500 steel targets recommend that you shoot them from 100 yards minimum to avoid damaging the plate or spalling. So that's something to be said right there. I mean, just the fact that you can shoot at this multiple times from only 30 feet away and not have any penetration really speaks to the overall quality of this plate. Now, the materials are all made in the United States. That to me is a really big deal. Now, what it's made of is an ultra high molecular weight polyethylene that is bound together with a resin matrix. Now, that is completely above my pay grade. I don't know how they do that, but what I know is that leads to an extremely strong plate that I would definitely trust my life to. Now, unfortunately, my camera battery died and I had to wrap it up for the day. However, I am gonna head out next weekend and put as many rounds into this plate as I can and we'll see what it takes to actually poke a hole in it. But keep in mind, this actually can stop up to a 7.62x51mm, M85 5.56x45, 7.62x39, Chinese, you name it. This thing can really stop a wide variety of ammunition. Now, also when I head out next weekend to finish up the rifle plate, I'm also gonna be testing out their pistol plate, which is level 3A armor. So if you're interested in any of this armor, make sure that you check out the website. I'll put it in the description box, DefenderArmor.com, D-F-N-D-R-Armor.com. Thank you all very much for tuning in and watching this video. I hope you are as impressed with this stuff as I am and you'll tune in next week to see the other armor and the finishing up of this rifle armor test. Let's see how many rounds this thing actually takes. Thank you again very much. Please like, subscribe. Have a great day. You