[Video Transcript]
Hello! I’m RyanF9 and today we crash test the Icon Stryker Rig.
Fun fact – this is the preferred blouse for 90% of the world’s mercenaries. It also hijacks your wallet for $350 dollars, and steals its chest and back plates from the Icon Stryker Vest , which costs half as much. Plus this is the only under-jacket armour that nobody has ever worn underneath a jacket.
That’s because the Stryker Rig makes your pecs look so good.. And by that I mean BryanF9’s pecs… I haven’t seen the inside of a gym since high school.
Now, waterproofing is not a fair test for a jacket that is 75% stretch mesh. But since we score everything on an extremely scientific nine-point scale, the Stryker Rig will have to embarrass itself in SeaWorld all the same.
Failure… that thing motivational posters refer to as a stepping stone to success .
Well in this case it’s a stepping stone to getting shot. Because our next test is puncture strength, where we fire a BB, a lead pellet and a penetrating pellet at 500fps. I’ll put three into the stretch material and three into the armor plate.
So , all three shots went through the mesh layer and lodged themselves somewhere near BryanF9’s liver, which is less than ideal. On the flip side, the armor plate stopped all three shots. I guess we’ll call that a half success.
Now, spine protection – easily the most important and most disappointing part of this jacket. You see I’d expect a CE Level 2 rating for such an enormous piece of plastic with D3O viscoelastic inserts.  Just like I’d expect a dragon-scale spine to actually limit movement in the wrong direction. I’m not sure why Icon didn’t do better on this… probably they were too busy designing logos.
So I’ve already added insult, but is there injury too… more than 100Gs .
Uh..more than 100Gs again. I’m actually surprised that failed.
Chest armor is hilarious though. First Icon ran out of D3O, so there isn’t any behind here. Then they ran out of plastic, so Icon just molded a tiny shield and coloured-in the rest with a similar-looking textile. But hey, at least they wrote Protect Us on the front… I’m sure that will help a lot.
Oh no… that’s very confusing. I have no idea why the Protect Us badge didn’t work … maybe I forgot to say the magic word.
Half-mark. That’s the magic word when it comes to abrasion resistance. Ready to see me grind through the Stryker Rig’s chassis? Done.
But watch me grind through one of the armor plates… it takes 1 minute and 21sec until BryanF9 starts losing skin. He can’t even ride a motorcycle that long, let alone crash one for 1 minute 21 seconds.
So we get another half-point for abrasion resistance… which makes sense since the Stryker Rig is only half a decent jacket.
One, two, three plastic plates, D3O backing, and yet somehow more than 100Gs… failing grade for elbow protection.
Welcome to the burn unit… where we test fire protection. Looks like HydraDry is doing pretty good. Ah there’s D30 in there, you can already smell it. Smells like oranges a bi. It actually does when you’re burning D3. Let’s go up to the plastic… nothing exciting going on there. This is BioFoam on the waist belt. Whoa that stuff is… Woo! That’s flammable! Now over to the main chassis here is stretch mesh and no surprises you get through that super easily. The stuff is nice though, it doesn’t have as much tension as a lot of similar jackets.
So one trip to the burn unit, and my Icon Stryker Rig is reduced to a pile of impact protectors. The mesh chassis had no fire resistance whatsoever, just burned and vanished almost instantly. By contrast the armour bits did actually pretty well. That makes sense since what you’re paying for here is essentially some mediocre impact protectors and not much else. I guess we’ll call that another half point.
If I may draw your attention to the back protector, we noticed a significant build-quality issue today. These plastic rivets that hold the dragon scales … they have a knack for popping out.  We lost a lot of those. Another thing we noticed which is quite rare is that the impact protectors actually fractured apart during some of the test which we don’t normally see and that might be why they did worse than I excpected.
So, a failing grade for build quality rounds off FortNine’s nine tests. If you’ve been tracking alright, you’ll know that the Icon Stryker Rig scored one and a half FortNines out of nine, which is terrible but maybe not that terrible considering that our testing method was designed for regular motorcycle jackets and not whatever the hell a Stryker Rig is.
Next week we have one of our most-requested crash tests. BrianF9 is sporting a regular pair of Wranglers, and these are Icon Overlord motorcycle jeans . So, how much safer are riding jeans when compared to regular denim? We’ll find out next week, consider subscribing to FortNine if you don’t want to miss it, and until then, take care!