Looking forward to your impressions on the vest after you get some time with it.
Looking forward to your impressions on the vest after you get some time with it.
The Crye LVS is sort of a let-down.....I think I would have been better off buying a high quality regular vest. The top of the vest doesn't fall flat against my chest, but sticks out a bit as it's semi-rigid and pre-formed into a specific curve that doesn't match my chest......this leads to a very noticeable bulge under the neck line that is very noticeable in a suit. In my suit, I had some people say they didn't realize I was wearing armor until I pointed out, whereas I also had some people strike up a conversation out of the blue about what armor I was wearing, if I always wear armor on protection, etc.
It's a pretty hot vest to wear, as it's akin to wearing a plastic medieval breast-plate tight against your skin. Even sitting in a well air-conditioned car, my undershirt would be soaked through in sweat after just a couple hours. I went walking outside for 1 hour and could just about wring out my undershirt when I got back.
Agility kind of sucks. It took a little adjustment to make it fit better, but it's still not very easy to move around in as it's semi-rigid and when it interferes with your motions it takes a LOT more effort to push through than a Kevlar vest. I don't even think I'd be able to shoot in an isosceles stance if I had gotten the standard cut instead of the "Patrol" cut. I felt like a turtle trying to roll myself in/out of vehicles, especially police cruisers with the extra equipment (I worked out of a lot of Caprice PPVs the last two weeks).
Comfort isn't too great. I wore it while securing a venue for 9 hours on rotating sitting/standing post. Sitting in it isn't terribly comfortable as you feel like you're wearing a plastic corset. Wearing it for a long time led to me feeling like it was pushing my shoulders in an unnatural way, and I got a bit sore. I needed to do some old-school warmup exercises like arm circles to get the cramping out when I was done for the night. The front breast-plate seems to be sized correctly, but the back is fucking massive and goes all the way from my belt line to the base of my neck. The profile of the back is about as big as a SPEAR/BALCS vest, and larger than the Velocity Systems LPAAC I have.
In the end, it's at least serviceable so I'll continue wearing it. Maybe it will break in more and become better.....I don't know. It's well concealed under my street clothes, so I'll probably wear it for field interviews instead of wearing the Chameleon shirt which only has plate-sized coverage. I might stick with the chameleon shirt for protection....I'm not sure at this point, which isn't a good sign.
Last edited by TGS; 09-26-2017 at 05:37 PM.
"Are you ready? Okay. Let's roll."- Last words of Todd Beamer
That's ungood. Since Crye relies upon you measuring yourself without a sizing vest to try on, I wonder if they would recut/resize your back panel or reshape the front panel for you.
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