Vest Sizing and Adjustment

Vest Adjustment

While our load bearing vests and body armour are made to your measurements, they will likely require some adjustment prior to use.

There are four points of adjustment on each of our vests: both shoulders and both sides of the waist. 

When adjusting the fit, ensure that:

• adjustments are made such that the adjustment points are in the same position on each size of the vest, ie it is symetrical
• there is a minimum of 50mm hook and loop engagement at each vest adjustment point.

Adjust the vest as follows:

1. Put the vest on (with ballistic or stab armour panels fitted, if optioned) and check:
2. 1. around the waist should be snug and neither tight nor loose when sitting, standing and bending over
   2. the bottom of the vest should come down to roughly your navel - approx 50mm higher or a little lower is OK.
3. Adjust the waist on each side, testing the tension sitting, standing and bending over
4. Adjust the shoulders on each side such that the vest comes down to roughly your navel - approx 50mm higher or a little lower is OK.  
5. Re-test the vest fit, standing, sitting and bending over and fine tune as necessary.

Body Armour Coverage

While the ideal body armour system would protect the whole body from ballistic (ie bullet) and/or stab threats, such as system would be heavy, hot and severely impact mobility and task performance. Therefore, body armour design is inherently a trade-off between protection from relevant ballistic and/or stab threats, weight/comfort and mobility/task performance. 

Much of the research into optimisation of this trade-off comes from the defence sector. 

Torso body armour designed for long duration use, (ie not specialist tactical armour donned in high risk situations) is generally designed to cover the vital organs only. Based on research into fatality rates from injuries to various organs, vital organs are considered to be the heart, great vessels, liver and spleen (source: Breeze et al).

As such, body armour should at a minimum, cover from just below the top of the sternum to approx 50mm above the navel. Any lower than the navel is likely to cause the armour to ride up when seated.

To ensure all body shapes and sizes are covered, Hellweg ballistic and stab proof body armour comes in short, regular, long and extra long lengths. These lengths are based off, but less than, the distance from the top of the sternum to the navel.