Archive | Tactical Gear

This is a followup to yesterday’s post about the new gear in development at UW Gear. All of the items shown here are developemnt prototypes that may not reflect how the product will look once it reaches production… if it even reaches production.

UW Gear has been working on a belt kit for some time now. This (above) is the first prototype that they have shown publicly. The belt is wider than most to bear weight effectively and has light padding sewn in. Circumferential stitching locks the padding in place and adds structure to the belt. The suspenders are somewhat reminiscent of UW Gear’s chest rig harnesses in that they thin but but wide rather than padded. I should also note that the magazine pouches shown are prototypes or belt specific double mag pouches.

They have also been working on a canteen/utility pouch design. This pouch is large enough to hold a canteen with cookset and features UW Gear’s tuck tab closure. This would be at home on a belt kit or even used to expand the carrying capacity of a ruck.

I don’t mind covered magazine pouches, especially on a chest rig. In fact, I prefer them in many cases. However, UW Gear is commonly asked to produce a chest rig with open top pouches. They are developing one that uses a combination of shock cord retention with Kydex inserts to retain the magazine. The Kydex inserts are secured in the pouches with Velcro. The shock cord tension system provides some redundancy in that, if the Kydex insert is lost or broken, the shock cord still provides enough tension to retain the magazine.

UW Gear has been hard at work developing several new items and improvements. They gave me a sneak peek at some of their working prototypes so I could share them with you.

The above chest rig shows off two potential new items come to the UW Gear line: split front rigs that are joined with zippers instead of buckles and a new double magazine pouch design. The zipper is purely an R&D feature at this time. The double magazine pouch is the real star here. It features UW Gear’s well known and excellent tuck tab closure along with a fully enclosed channel for adjustable and user repairable shock cord tensioners. These tensioners are in place to ensure a relatively tight fit whether the pouch is holding one or two magazines.

The next chest rig (above) features the same zipper closure but also gives a good look at a new item and a potential change coming to UW Gear’s chest rigs. The new item is the unnamed bleeder/utility pouch that you see on both sides of the rig. It features UW Gear’s tuck tab closure and is designed to be compact enough to fit just 2 columns of PALS webbing yet large enough to carry medical or general purpose essentials. You’ll also notice that UW Gear is experimenting with 1″ hardware where the shoulder straps come out of the top of the chest panels. This could streamline production with no real change in performance since the harness still tapers to its standard width.

Last but not least… We finally have our first glimpse at UW Gear’s pistol magazine pouches. These feature the tuck tab closure and are fully MOLLE compatible. The flaps are adjustable at the back to account for magazines of differing length.