Gear Review: AR500 Armor Lightweight Level III+ Plates

By Cameron Zucker

The body armor market has been an explosion of innovation in the last 30 years. There is such a wide variety of new materials, from Kevlar and Aramid fiber soft vest designs to new Ultra High Molecular Weight Polyethylene (UHMWPE) plates, that there is always something new to experiment with. With the recent AR500 craze in reusable steel targets, many shooters immediately made the obvious logical leap to using ultra-hard steel as body armor (although the idea of using metal plates as body armor isn’t exactly new). The main problem with that is that steel, unlike Polyethylene or ceramic compounds, is extremely heavy, which makes the already uncomfortable task of wearing body armor even more taxing. But AR500 Armor has developed some new lightweight plates which deliver excellent protection in a slim profile, and I shot the crap out of them to see how they stack up . . .

The Goods

AR500 Armor, an Arizona-based manufacturer of hard and soft body armor, recently debuted their new lightweight line of Level III+ hard armor plates, which sport a Special Threat rating that defeats a wide array of common (and uncommon) threats. It’s important …read more

Source:: Truth About Guns