FirstSpear Tubes - Tough Enough?
Channel: The Full 9
Date: 2012-10-23

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Since I did my review on the really excellent Strandhogg SAPI Plate Carrier from FirstSpear LLC one question/concern I've had a fair few times has been to do with the Tubes technology that FS has employed to remove the masses of velcro from the cummerbund and shoulder straps of most Plate Carriers.  A lot of people were cautious and wondered whether these polymer connectors would be sturdy enough to take the punishment necessary.

Well luckily FirstSpear recently sent me a whole set of field replaceable Tubes to upgrade my Strandhogg since a very small number of the ones they'd moulded in the very first batch had encountered some problems.  I had to use a cutting disc on a dremel to actually get the original Tubes off my PC since they were so tough but I didn't think that was relevant to the sort of rigours this kit would encounter out in the field; it seemed more appropriate that they'd probably get bashed in to walls/dropped/smashed on etc rather than be cut by a tool.

So once I'd taken the old Tubes off my PC and fitted the new set (which is why in the video you see some cuts in the plastic or small parts already broken off) I thought that before I binned the old kit it would make sense to use the female parts of the connectors to see how much punishment they could take before they gave in.  I managed to pretty much explode one of the cummerbund parts, but as you'll see, it took a whole lot of force before that happened.

NB:  I say the female sections because the Tubes tech uses two pieces, one is just a slim length of plastic (the male) which slots along and locks in to a U-shaped attachment (the female).  Since the female part of the connector would be a lot more likely to crack under these test I decided to use them, because just hammering at a simple slab of plastic with no real shape to it wouldn't have ever done anything realistically.