Body Armor LVL IIIA, III and III+ From TNT Tactical

Hey everybody, how's it going? It's The Daily Shooter and this video should be a lot of fun. Today I have three different types of body armor panels to test out for you. Everything from level 3A to level 3 to level 3+, all sent to the channel by tnttactical.com. And as you can see from the table, I have several firearms to test it out with. Everything from 9mm to 5.56, .300 Blackout, Sharps 25, .45, and .308. But first I want to start by showing you the panels. Now, these panels are very affordable. If you go to the link in the description box, you'll see what I'm talking about. The price is great. Now the first panel we're looking at right here is a level 3A. This is basically ready for your pistol. This is a side panel. And level 3A will go up to .44 Magnum, multiple hits. The center one right here, this is a steel plate. It has a fibrous material in the front, kind of like, almost like Kevlar, but it's an anti-spalling material. This level 3 will take a lot of hits. We're going to test it out all the way up to the .308 with 168 grains here, Match King. The next one is going to be our lightweight panel. This is a level 3+, so it's actually set up to take a little bit more than your standard steel level 3 plate. Now the level 3 plus plate is a little bit thicker, but again, it's extremely lightweight. Very nice, and again, affordable. Now if you take a look at some of the ammunition that we're going to use today from AmmoSquared.com, I should mention that the panels that I'm using today are just for testing. The customer is going to receive a much nicer panel. I actually took some of the stickers off and spray painted on them, so they look a little bit different than what the consumer will get. They'll be much nicer. Now the ammunition, we have 7.62x51 NATO, 150 grain. We also have 168 grain Sierra Match King .308 for our .308 bolt action gun. We also have the Sharps Rifle Company 25-45. We have their 100 grain Swine Smasher, and their 70 grain Varmint projectile. We also have a little bit of .300 Blackout, two different loads there. We have a 150 grain full metal jacket, as well as a 120 grain supersonic open tip round from Remington. We'll go ahead and we'll take a look at that. We also have the standard that everybody likes to see. One that typically beats steel body armor, which is our XM193 5.56, and we have the green tip. The green tip is a little bit harder on the softer body panels, and a little bit less on the hard panels. Just keep that in mind. If you're looking at a steel plate, XM193 is your enemy. If you're looking at a lighter weight ceramic style plate, then green tip is your enemy. Here's our setup right here. We have our ballistic shell torso. Let's go ahead and take our first shot with the 5.56 XM193. Let's take a look at our plate. The reason that XM193 is typically bad for steel body armor is because it's moving fast. I actually shot this out of an 18 inch black rain ordnance barrel, so it has a lot of velocity behind it. We hit it dead center on the plate. As you can see, that anti-spalling material kept everything inside, but there is nothing on the back. You can still see the stickers sitting there, and not even a little bit of a bulge. XM193, 18 inch barrel, and absolutely no damage to the steel plate. That's the one that I was actually worried about. Now we're going to try a little bit of green tip. This is the one that everybody seems to want to see, so this is the one that we're going to test out. It has a steel core penetrator. It's not armor piercing, but it does have that little penetrating core in it. Let's go ahead and shoot this again out of an 18 inch barrel black rain ordnance. We're about 30 feet away from our target. Let's go ahead and take a look at our panel. You can see the entry hole right there. It looks like everything was pretty much contained by that spalling material, and then again on the back, absolutely nothing. I didn't really expect anything from the green tip, but still, you can see right there, zero damage to the panel whatsoever. Now we're going to bump it up a little bit. We're going to bump it up all the way to the .308. We're going to pass the .25, .45, and the .300 blackout for now. We will hit it with those calibers later, but I want to bump it up to the NATO round. That's going to be 7.62 by 5.1 NATO, 150 grain, full metal jacket out of a 20 inch barrel. You can see how much harder that hits than your standard .556. So again, 18 inch barrel, SLR Rifleworks compensator that I got from MSRArms.com, and that thing packs one hell of a punch, let me tell you. So here is our .308. Again, this is the NATO round, full metal jacket. It's moving pretty quick. I'm not exactly sure, but you can see right there that we do have a little bit of a dent. Not much, it definitely did not go through, but really only left just a minimal amount of denting. So I'm really impressed, especially for affordable body armor. So now let's go ahead and hit it again, .308, 168 grain Sierra Match King. Okay, now let's take a look at our plate after we hit it with both the 150 grain and the 168 grain Sierra Match King. And if you don't know, the .308 Sierra Match King bullet is an open tip projectile, so I do want you to keep that in mind. Now that hit right there, you can see that it's kind of a distance away from our other shots there, so it has a fair advantage. And you can see that that one actually left just the slightest little bulge right there. It kind of tore our paper, but still absolutely zero penetration and very, very minimal back face deformation. You can see right there, it's maybe the size of my fingernail in width, and it barely sticks up enough to make any type of shadow so I can show the camera. So that's really impressive. But now we're going to move on. This is a really interesting round. This is the Swine Smasher in .25-45 caliber from Sharps Rifle Company. I just recently got their upper. It's a 20-inch barreled upper, and we're going to shoot this. Look at this thing. It's just a slug. It's just a big, heavy slug that is traveling at almost 3,000 feet per second. So I'm really curious to see what this is going to do, but again, this is a very interesting caliber. It's a .25 caliber, and we're going to be shooting this through that Sharps Rifle Company upper receiver, and let's see what it does. And after the Swine Smasher, we're going to follow that up with the 70-grain projectile. This is one of their Predator loads, also a .25-45 projectile with a polymer tip. So that's going to lead to a little bit of expansion. I'm curious to see what type of damage that does to the plate, but moving very fast. Now we're going to go ahead. We're just going to start with the Swine Smasher. You can see what this thing looks like once you put it in the magazine. It's just completely unique, and I love it. Again, this is going to be shooting out of a 20-inch barrel. Okay, so that is not where I intended to hit the plate. I actually hit that one only about an eighth of an inch away from the plate. So what I'm going to do now is load up in a magazine a Swine Smasher on top of one of the 70-grain projectiles, and we're going to shoot it again. First with the Swine Smasher, second with the Predator round, the 70-grain. Then we're going to pull it off, and we'll take a look at all three hits. So the first hit we're going to take a look at is the one that hit just on the edge, and if you're talking about defeating body armor, you're most likely to defeat it if you hit the edges. So I was pretty surprised. We hit right there, right on the edge of the plate. We flip it over, and absolutely nothing went through. So I was pretty happy about that actually. Now here's what kind of surprised me. The 5.56 obviously didn't leave any kind of dent. The .308 left a dent, but not a very big one. Well here you can see our Swine Smasher, which hit on the top, and then our 70-grain, which hit right next to the .308. The Swine Smasher actually left a dent on the back about the same size as the original .308. Now our 70-grain projectile kind of expanded that dent a little bit, but the original dent is about the same size as the .308. So a lot of energy being transferred, but absolutely nothing went through. So pretty big heavy hitter, that .25-45. Just about as much as the .308 left a dent on the back of this panel, but still, no pass-through. Pretty impressive. Alright, now I'm just going to shoot it because I know nothing's going to go through that I have. So I'm just going to shoot it four times at the .300 Blackout and see what it does to the panel altogether. So four shots, .300 Blackout, you can see a lot of spalling pushing that material out the sides there. But still, it didn't do really any damage at all to the panel itself. Other than the spalling, we flipped this thing over, there's no extra dents, no extra dings, no back-face deformation really of anything to note with the .300 Blackout. But this thing's been beat up pretty well so far. Couple rounds of Swine Smasher, couple rounds of .308, couple rounds of .556, and absolutely nothing's gone through. So pretty good panel, and extremely affordable like I said. I'm really impressed with this thing. Okay, now we're going to take a look at the lightweight level 3 plus plates. And again, this is going to be a little bit thicker than the standard level 3 steel plate and that's because there's no metal used in the construction of this thing. But that's why it's so extremely lightweight. But it still maintains the high threat level rating of level 3 plus. So this is the direction that I typically go with my body armor when I can afford it. It's a little bit more expensive than your steel stuff. So with this, we're going to test it a little bit differently. We're going to start off with the high with the .308. It's going to be the 7.62x5.1 150 grain full metal jacket round. And then without checking the plate, we're going to shoot three different types of rounds at it. Green tip, XM193, and the Swine Smasher 25.45. So let's go ahead and take some shots with that. Then we'll pull our plate and let's see what it looks like after four high powered rounds. Okay, so here's the panel. This is what it looks like after it's been hit with our four rounds. Again, the .308, Swine Smasher, XM193, and green tip. And you can see right here that the front face is just a little bit bulged right there. We have our .308 is the one that hit directly in the center. We have our Swine Smasher actually hit directly below that. So I was a little bit concerned there that they were kind of close. And then we have our XM193 and the green tip. Now on the back, as you can see, it's a little bit deformed and that's perfectly normal for armor like this, especially when it's not up against the body. So I had it kind of leaned a little bit away from our ballistics gel torso. Had it been up closer to the torso, it would have been a little bit less back face deformation. But still, nothing went through. It kind of ripped the material in the back and I kind of had to dig to see if there was any holes in the material underneath it. But no, absolutely nothing went through. So that was .308, again, .556, and 25.45. Direct shots right in the center of the panel and nothing went through. So really cool stuff, extremely lightweight, and it stopped it. So now let's go ahead and hit it a couple times with some .300 Blackout. Why not, right? 120 grain, as you can see right here, this is a supersonic ammunition. This is going over 2,000 feet per second. So let's go ahead and hit it with some .300 Blackout. Okay, so I didn't have that strapped up very well. I was a little bit worried about that. But our .300 Blackout, actually, it didn't go through. You can see here a little bit extra back face deformation, again, because it was held away from our target. This is actually meant to be worn inside of a plate carrier against a person's body. That's how it works the best. So without any type of something to hold the back of it, you're going to get that deformation there. But still, no pass through on any of the calibers that we used. Okay, now we're going to go ahead and move on to our Level 3A plate. This is a little side panel that I have right here just for testing. And Level 3A is typically good up to .44 Magnum. So it should take multiple rounds up to .44 Magnum. I don't have a .44 Magnum. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to shoot it with several different weights and types of 9mm. The first shot's going to be with a 147 grain hollow point. It's a plus P self-defense load. Then I'm going to go ahead and follow that up with a 124 grain Hornady Custom XTP. And then after that, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and put the panel inside the shirt and we'll shoot it a bunch more. So here we're going to go ahead, we're going to shoot it a couple times. It's going to be with a couple 124 grain hollow points. Again, Hornady Custom, I believe it's the XTP bullet. So we'll go ahead and take those shots. Now since the panel kept falling out, what we're going to do is we're just going to take the panel and put it inside the t-shirt here. And then just kind of unload some standard 115 grain and 124 grain full metal jacket rounds just kind of randomly put into a magazine. So we'll have a total of 12 rounds on this particular panel. Again, nothing really holding it to the body, it's just kind of sitting in the plate right there. And we're just going to punish it with the Glock 17. So a 4.5 inch barrel, 115 and 124 grain full metal jackets to finish it off right here. Okay, so now we're going to go ahead and grab the panel, take a look at it. And I can tell you that 12 rounds on a side panel is a lot. I don't care what caliber you're hitting it with, that's a little panel taking a lot of abuse. So let's go ahead and take this thing out, take a quick look at it and see how bad it looks. I'm wondering if anything actually made it through. Now it did rip off the outer cover, I have it in my left hand as you can see right there. You can see this kind of just a foam backing which kind of holds everything together. But sure enough, no pass through. So we have some plus P ammunition, hollow points, full metal jackets, different weights and loads, and absolutely nothing went through our little side panel. It took a ton of abuse, but thankfully nothing went through. So as we kind of peel the little parts away here, you can actually see some of our rounds on the inside. This is a full metal jacket round, if you ever wanted to see what a full metal jacket looks like after it hits soft body armor, this is what it looks like. It just completely squished it. So you can see right there, it just turns it into a little slug. So that's just really interesting if you ever wanted to see what that looks like. That's what it looks like right there. You can see a little bit of the lead. And then I believe this is going to be one of our hollow points. So you can see right here, instead of just being a slug, it kind of squishes open. We lost some of the pedals. You can see there's some pedals inside there, little copper fragments. But that's one of our hollow points, and it seemed to stop about halfway through, not even halfway through actually of that little panel. So like I was saying before, this is all affordable body armor from TNT Tactical. They sent this out to the channel for review. They didn't have any expectations. They just wanted me to shoot it, test it, and tell them what I thought about it. And to be honest with you, I think it's great. It holds up to everything that you want to put it through. You know, .308 and some of the heavier calibers, and some calibers it's probably not rated for, like the .25-45, I wasn't really sure what was going to happen there. Barrel lengths, anywhere from 18 inches, 16 inches for the .300 Blackout, up to 20 inches for the .25-45 and .308, and not a single issue. So definitely for affordable body armor, this is a great option worth checking out. So go over to TNTTactical.com, I'll put a link in the description box. Thank you all very much for watching. Please like, subscribe. Have a great day. Peace out.