Video Transcript
Before we get into the details on the new T.REX ARMS TRAAP Chest Rig, I want to take you guys through the Marine Corps issue TAPS chest rig, which a lot of you guys are going to be comparing to our new chest rig, the TAPS. So, this chest rig has been around for a long time. It gets issued to the Marine Corps, and it's also been issued to the Army and a bunch of other entities. If you've been in the military for the last couple decades or last decade, you've probably used one, and you've probably hated different parts of it. So, going over some of the features on this chest rig, it's a seven mag chest rig wide, so you can accommodate an entire combat load. There's molle on the front, so you can attach all of your different pouches, grenade pouches, wherever it happens to be. There's a few downfalls to this particular rig that requires a lot of aftermarket upgrades if you want to bring it into the modern era. For example, on the inside, there is no Velcro field for attaching dangler-style pouches, tourniquet holders, even radio wings. You do have on the underside, though, three separate GP pockets, which is pretty nifty. One is zipper, so a lot of guys will put their survival sort of gear on this side, and then they'll have their maps and their land nav equipment, and these two over here.
But probably the biggest downfall to this chest rig, well, this assault panel, is the harness itself. It comes with a really jank harness that most guys don't like, and they immediately try to upgrade into something different. But they have to add different buckles on the sides, because as you can see, there's just a single male-ended buckle here that attaches to a single point on the back, and then goes up into two straps that go across the top. You also have no Velcro on the front. This rig has actually been modified. It has a little admin panel here on the front from Eagle, I believe, so that the guy who I bought this from, I guess, was using this as some sort of quick-use pouch and could throw an ID panel here on the front. And this guy also already upgraded this chest rig with S&S Percision pull tabs. So this guy has already upgraded this tap as much as possible to bring it into the modern era, but it is still lacking in a lot of features. Now, the benefit to these is they're cheap. You can pick these up pretty much anywhere, and then you can go through the process of upgrading the harness, upgrading different parts on it, and bring it closer to how chest rigs are being made today. But after looking at this rig and other rigs on the market, a hole in our lineup was a molle chest rig that allows you to customize and use for lots of different purposes. So we designed the TRAAP Chest Rig.
Now, as you will see, it is a very similar in form factor to the TAPS, and that's because it's obviously drawn from inspiration, and there's only so many ways to make a molle chest rig. But in this case, we have six mag wide, so it's a little bit reduced, so it's a little bit more comfortable to wear. We have full molle on the front, but we have full velcro, or a bunch of velcro on the front, eight molle wide, so that you can attach all sorts of different velcro pouches, ID panels directly, and this is all velcro sewn on top of molle, so you can still attach all of your frag pouches, your admin pouches, GP, extra mags if you want to, all of that good stuff. On the inside, we have a full standard molle field, so you can attach your various danglers, sack pouches, turnip holders, whatever it happens to be. There is a cover that goes on over that, that will come with every rig, so that you can be comfortable after you place all of your equipment, or if you don't use any at all. One thing that we did that was a little bit different is we have two. These aren't really dedicated radio pouches. We have these two sort of accessory pouches that are sewn on the inside.
Sort of the intent for these is you can put a turn kit in there, you can put little survival equipment, you can throw a radio in there, although if you are running a larger radio, it is more recommended that you actually use the cell on the exterior right here, which can fit a PRC-152, it can fit any of your civilian radios out there, not a problem, or you can just run magazines. You will see that there is a large GP, or sort of admin panel here in the center, so we obviously don't have, unlike the TAPS, multiple GP pouches, we just have one in the center. Included with this is going to be a zipper that can be removed, so a Velcro zipper sort of a style thing, so you can take that off, you can put it back on. And on the inside there is a mesh divider, so you can divide up your various equipment in there, your survival stuff on the inside, maybe your maps on the outside.
But we wanted to make this pocket very generous, so we actually have, as you will see, the form factor of the entire chest, where it actually moves up into this sort of enlarged admin area, so you can just carry more stuff and taller stuff, larger maps or notebooks, so it is just a little bit more useful when it comes to carrying that type of equipment. Now the most important thing is mag compatibility, so we designed this chest rig with 5.56 in mind, so every single mag pouch pocket has Velcro against the exterior, so you can add your Kydex inserts if you want to modernize this even more. There's no Velcro on the exterior, because that's not necessary. We have pull tabs that are already included, and this was designed specifically for 5.56 magazines.
However, we left a little bit of space in there, so that you can run your 7.62x39 just fine. 5.45x39. You can also run submachine gun mags, but that gets a little tricky, but you can run two per pouch, so you can run, you know, a lot of submachine gun magazine if you want. If you want to run 40 rounders, here's roughly what it's going to look like as far as an AR-15 magazine. And yes, that will work just fine. Now a 20-rounder, if you're running this chest rig for, say, an SPR, something like that, you want a mag that you can go prone with, but it's going to sit pretty deep in the rig. Doesn't necessarily mean you can't access it, but what I would recommend is looking for a Kydex insert of some sort, possibly a shorter one, and then actually moving that towards the top of the pouch so that that mag can maybe stick out a little bit more. But this is a super edge case that probably most of you aren't wanting to run 20 rounders, but it is something to note nonetheless.
If you're looking to get a Kydex insert, I recommend the Esstac tall. So this is roughly what it's going to look like in the rig. So what you want to do is you want to pinch it together. You're going to be pulling the Velcro side away from the pouch because you want to get this into the pouch before the Velcro engages. You're going to shove it all the way to the bottom. It's going to fill the bottom down here, release, and now the pouch is engaged, and that's what it's going to look like. At this point, you probably don't need the pull tabs. That can be removed. You can then save it for something else, and it's going to look something like this. Without the pull tab, it is a pretty nifty way of having super fast reloads while still having good retention.
So that was something we really wanted to build into this rig. So you can very easily add Kydex so you can have that super fast retention that you might be used to, and then all you have to do is remove the pull tabs by undoing the knot right here, unthreading it through the molle, and you'll be good to go. The two pouches on the sides are sized a little bit larger, and there were a few reasons for that. One was so they could accommodate a few more radios and other types of equipment. You could put medical gear on the inside. You could kind of run whatever you want, and on this pouch, we actually have Velcro on the exterior and on the interior. So there's lots of other products out there that I'm sure are going to be made for this specific pouch, little holders that can hold different equipment or even dedicated little radio cups that can put a smaller civilian radio closer to the top of the pouch so it's easier to access. This pouch right here is actually large enough to fit a M110 SR-25 TALL magazine.
Now, would I recommend doing that? Probably not. But if you were someone who, say, was moving with a 5.56 rifle and then you have a precision gas gun once you get to your location, yes, this can technically carry a couple of those magazines, but that's probably not what we're going to be using these pouches for. As far as running a 5.56 mag in this pouch, it'll move a little bit side to side, not really a problem, especially once you're wearing the rig tight to the body. Just engage the pull tab so you can have maximum ammunition. Just like on the Quad-Flap Chest Rig and the Triple Placard, we have our three little chest rig loops, and they're still spaced the same as those other rigs. The reason for that is in testing, for the last chest rig we made, we found out that running the back strap all the way down to the corner of the chest rig kind of makes everything on the sides tip outwards. We found that it was just much better when it came to load carrying to actually run the back strap on the middle of the chest rig pulling from the middle of the entire load. All you're going to do is pop the Swift Clip Buckle out, which is a split bar, and then you're going to move that to the center. Now, I have a fun little tip here. You're actually going to push the center in like this, so you're going to fold both corners out, and that just makes it a whole lot easier to drop this buckle in.
Boom, see how easy it is? It's awesome. Now that I'm in the middle, it's just going to be much easier to run the back straps, going to be more comfortable, it's going to be more stable, and every single TRAAP Rig comes with our large adjustable back strap that also has shock elastic on the sides for readability, and so it's just super comfortable. One thing you can do, and this is actually kind of fun if you want to experiment with it, is actually running two back straps. When you have a chest rig that is fully loaded, getting a little bit more support does work very well, especially when you're moving around and sprinting and running and gunning. You can actually add a second back strap, size that accordingly, and the cool thing is, obviously, the higher back straps, it's up on your back, is going to probably be a little bit looser than the one that's further down, so you can actually tailor both of them to your body, and then it's super stable. So that's one thing you can look into, and that is one reason we have two of these little loops here on the side, just because it gives you more options.
The harness is our typical H-harness, so you're going to have all of the different webbing up on the top for all of your different PTT's and different equipment, hydration hoses, whatever it happens to be. You can adjust height with the SwiftClip buckle along the molle here on the front, so just adjust the buckle down to the bottom, middle, and here to the top. You have one thing of one wrap right here for attaching your PTTs and hoses. You then have a row of elastic, cordura, cordura, and then elastic at the top. This elastic at the top I typically use for my comms cable. It comes off of my ear pro. It's going to just go straight through there to prevent all that cable from flopping around, and that's kind of how I use it. Large ID field here on the back, so you can throw a flag up here, and you're good to go.
You also adjust the H-harness here on the side, so where it's going to attach to the front of the chest rig, you have just a standard tri-glide and webbing, so you just move that around to where you need it. For the TRAAP's rig. Let's go ahead and run through a few different loadouts and what some different equipment actually looks like on the rig itself. There's a Spiritus sack pouch. The T.REX ARMS MED-H. And we've got the T.REX ARMS Wallaby. What I'm probably going to be doing is just throwing a flag patch on the front. With a lot of chest rigs, you don't necessarily have an ID panel up top to run some sort of flag, so having some Velcro field on the front of a chest rig is super useful.
If you're not running an ID panel or a flag, you can take something like our sticky GP pouch, run that on the front, and it just gives you another zipper compartment for all of your snacks and whatever you happen to have, and then that also has an ID panel. If you still want a flag and you're good to go. So I've got a few different configurations of TRAAP Chest Rig that I want to show you to you guys. So this one is probably familiar to a bunch of you. So this is a Coyote Brown TRAAP that I have configured with some Marine Corps-issued pouches. You have the large assault pouch on the front, which is essentially a glorified GP pouch. You can throw all kinds of stuff in there, and it's got dividers and tie-downs. They can sit nice and flat when I'm not using it and not get in the way. We've got the issued medical kit on the side, or one of them, with the Marine Corps issues. So it has just… You know, I can load it up with all the meds, all the things that I need. That's a 3x3 molle pouch.
Two flashbang pouches on the side. Obviously, you can take flashbangs or multi-tools, pistol mags, whatever it happens to be. And then I have five magazines loaded up, and I'm running the large pouch here on the side as my radio pouch. And one thing that I did was I took one of our mini thigh strap little kits that we make for the dump pouch, and I harvested the buckle out of one of those, and I attached it to the front, and I attached the other one to the rear. And so that gives me a nifty way of securing a large radio on the side, and that is what it looks like. And then I can have all my different survival stuff on the inside of my map equipment, and I can have my PTT, GPS, all the good things, and that's about what that looks another way of doing a loadout.
One piece of equipment that I highly recommend that is super useful are the Blue Force Gear 10-speed pouches. What a lot of guys do is they get a shingle of this. They throw it on the front of their plate carrier, on the front of whatever piece of equipment they have, and if they ever need somewhere to put items, they have these elastic cells on the front. And when they don't need to carry different equipment, they can go prone on it, and it's not a problem. If they need to plus up ammunition for any reason, or maybe run a speed reload, they can do that, in addition to all the other magazines that they have. So this rig right here is kind of set up for optimal prone use, so I have nothing on the front. I have two small pouches on the side. Our little SIP pouches, one for a multi-tool on the right, because I don't generally have to get into this one as much. This one on the left can be for a pistol mag or a flashlight. Our 3-cell GP pouch, which can fit all kinds of… all my batteries, all my other pieces of equipment. A small Teraway Med Kit on the side. This is a two row malice pouch here on the side. Tourniquet tucked into the cell right here, and then I have this pouch right here available for other items.
And then I have a small YASU radio tucked on the inside of the chest rig itself, so it's not necessarily, you know, a large radio just tucked in there. And then I have my PTT all tied off, and that is what this rig looks like. It allows me to carry up to six magazines really quickly, plus another three if I need to, but I can still stay fairly slim. As far as a budget loadout goes, here's a TRAAPs build set up with no external pouches or other auxiliary products. So I have four magazines in the front. I can run Chemlights here in the malice webbing. If I'm doing a night shoot, I want to have some of those handy. The side pouch over here I have for headlamps and other equipment, such as batteries. And then on the large compartment on the left, I have a high-terra radio with a PTT going up to the H-harness.
I can have a tourniquet here. I can have a little bit of medical equipment. I can even run an EDC ITRK on the inside of my chest rig, inside of the GP panel if I really wanted. But this is one set up pretty slick. I can go prone on really nicely. It's not very large. It's just a very slim profile.
And then here's one that's filled to the max. So I've got six magazines in all the mag pouches. I've got a thinner pouch here on the front, a Shaw Concepts six cell on the front, nice and flat, two sit pouches on the side, again for multi-tools, flashlights, or mags. A Crye 3 cell on the side, whatever hydro pouches, and then the MED-H. And this can carry everything very comfortably. It gives me a lot of equipment to work from, a lot of pouches that can fill out with whatever I need. And so as you can see, the TRAAPs Rig is a very modular piece of equipment. Not so much in terms of buying specific proprietary accessories to go with the TRAAPs, because that's not something that philosophically we're really down with. You're at T.REX ARMS. We like to make products that you can use with other people's products on the market. But just having molle on the exterior, having some well-thought-out pouches on the inside, you really can use this chest rig for a lot of different purposes.
It's not necessarily something that a lot of civilians have access to right now, but there's obviously lots of ways you can build a rig out just like this. Now there was another feature that inadvertently became baked into this chest rig that we found out later And I do want to show it to you guys with the disclaimer that this is probably not something many of you need to do or should do but it is still an interesting thing that this rig can do. So we're going to detach the H-harness, we're going to open the admin panel is wide as we can.
We're going to take our medium And Now you have a hastily made single plate plate carrier Now like I said, this was not something that we originally designed into this rig But with the H-Harrnes attached to the front it actually pulls the plate really tight to the body and it does work quite Well a product that we might be making here in the future Is a simple plate holder made out of tweave material or some other stretch material where you are very simply going to the zipper compartment.
You have a piece of webbing that can keep the plate attached to the inside the actual chest rig admin pocket itself and Not come out as you're taking off the rig and whatnot. So so you guys might be thinking well, that's like the coolest thing ever I would love to have a chest rig that I can run a plate in the front and then just wear a pack and not Have all this weight of running a full plate carrier And if that's something that you're interested in and it's you know, it pertains to your use case then absolutely This is a chest rig that can do this In fact, it might be one of the only chest rigs that can do this at least as fast and as you know Just quickly without a bunch of other components. So it is nifty. It's not something that I will be using. It's not something most of us here at work are going to be using we had a long conversation Philosophically about this when would we do this over say just a full plate carrier? And most of us could not really think of anything that practical but it is still something that you can do with the TRAAPs And that is somewhat nifty, but that's for you to judge far as taking this chest rig and throwing it onto a plate carrier, what does that look like? Well, obviously if you just throw it on top remove the velcro panel and have slick velcro in the front, it will adhere to that and it's pretty comfortable. But what you can do is remove the H-harness completely, and the back strap.
Take your plate carrier, Velcro that in, And then what I would recommend is remove the velcro panel And then what you're going to have and this is this is going to restrict kind of the kind of the pouches you're gonna run The front but really the best way to run this on top of a plate carrier as a tactical assault panel clipping into a plate carrier is to actually run the cover bond directly on top of The rig itself and because there's velcro on the front it can attach Pulls everything really tight into the body and it actually works very well So that is one way that you can run this clipped into a plate carrier directly eliminate all the extra harness all the extra You know materials and what's going on and that is roughly what it's going to look like You don't even need radio wings attached to the plate carrier because you already have wings built into the TRAAPs Chest Rig itself And so it just flows very nicely.
I still have all my cells in the cover bond in this case that I can use for stuff The one thing to note with this though is this does overhang slightly compared to a standard medium-sized plate bag. So you do have that to deal with when it comes to attaching a dangler pouches and you know other pouches on the bottom, but in my experience, I haven't really noticed that more against the body. This just sits a little bit lower and it actually makes the magazines a little bit easier to get to because they're down here It's a little bit nicer. So then I could just take my PTT attach it to the plate carrier and there I'm good to go and I'm set. If you want to wear the TRAAPs on top, but still have it, you know on top of the cummerbund That's where you're gonna have to get like the Y-strap adapter You have to do something in the rear or if you're using a molle cummerbund on an issued plate carrier You're just gonna tie into some buckles on the side But this is something that actually works really well on a slick style plate carrier I just run the cummerbund directly on top into the Velcro on the TRAAPs and that just keeps everything super tight but I can still have six magazines I can still have all my different equipment and it still works quite well and if I absolutely need to run some other stuff on the front I can take my sticky GP.
Lock it all down have another pouch and just do lots of different stuff with the rate sums it up for the TRAAPs Chest Rig these are just a few different configurations That you can build your rig into with 14 rows of molle on the front I mean you can just do the math as you're looking at different pouches online and figure out how many pouches you could squeeze onto the front now just because you have 14 rows of molle on the front doesn't necessarily mean you want to fill all of it. With every single pouch out there think about what you really want to carry on your kit or what kinds of pouches you're looking for one thing I like to recommend is if you are just getting pouches. You don't know exactly what needs to go into into them yet. Get pouches that can compress into very small spaces so that they're not getting in the way and when you don't need them and then when you do have stuff that you need to cram somewhere You do have a pouch on the piece of equipment that you can then put the items in Rather than getting a pouch that is just molded and sewn to be really large and then has nothing in it, and that just kind of sucks if you have any other questions about the TRAAPs Chest Rig and how it's compatible with other products on the market or just how to set up your TRAAP Chest Rig go and email us at team@trex-arms.com.