Video Transcript
The Ready Rig is a hybrid chest rig that you can wear as a overt load-bearing system to carry ammunition, radios, communications gear, other things like that. But it was actually intended as something that you can wear underneath a shirt, surreptitiously, and then have some bare essentials, just a few things, some ammunition, radios, medical equipment, things like that, for whatever you happen to be doing. It is designed, unlike other chest rigs on the market, it's not some large thing with exterior pouches. Instead, it is an elastic-style cummerbund with individual cells for different equipment, an x-harness to help support the weight, and Velcro on the front for your ID panels, ID patches and whatever pouches you might want to put on the front, and the ability to carry three 5.56-style magazines in the front. And as you will see looking at it, this is very small, it's very slim, and you can wear it under a shirt like this relatively easily.
Now the overall design for this is very simple and straightforward. The front having the three 5.56 cells on the front, so that's gonna be your main compartment for ammunition. And then on each side you have our three different sizes of cells like we do on our plate carriers and like we do on the Ready Rig. You have a small cell for your pistol magazines, your multi-tools, your flashlights, things like that. A 5.56-size cell for your small civilian class radios, even larger radios, Motorola's, things like that. And then you have a larger cell in the rear, which was originally intended and is for medical equipment and other larger pieces of gear.
The back opens up, allowing you to adjust the overall length and width of the Ready Rig based on your body type, based how tight or loose you wanna wear this. I will give the recommendation that when you go to set how wide you want this to be, you have some equipment in the Ready Rig because as you fill the slots out, it is going to change the overall fitment of the rig. But the way you're going to adjust this is very simple. You're gonna open up the back panel and then you are going to set wherever you believe is going to be best, both or one or both or none of either side, shut the back panel. And now you have made the Ready Rig overall a little bit longer or shorter based on what you do. On the other side, you have a repeat of the same format.
You're gonna have a small cell for your small items, a 5.56 size cell and the larger cell in the rear. Now an update that we've made to the Ready Rig since we originally launched it is adding pull tab retainers here at the top of every single cell, except for the front three magazine. And the reason for that is some equipment just needs that retention off of the top, whether it's a radio, a magazine, something else like that. So if you are interested in utilizing these, we do sell a pack of pull tabs and shock cord and you can thread those on or you can make your own. I do recommend using something stretchy like shock cord if you go to make your own and you can buy spools of this virtually anywhere online.
The front has a generous field of Velcro. This is where you can put your ID panels and or something like the slim GP pouch, which was originally designed for this particular product that is attached to be a Velcro on the front. And that can go right here, giving you a quick and easy access zipper pouch for your papers, maps, kestrel, whatever small items snacks that you wanna put in there. And there's still a field of Velcro on the front for your flag patch or ID patch.
To size the Ready Rig, you're either going to do that in the rear like I showed, but you're gonna have to most likely adjust the harness itself. We do ship this with a pretty generous amount of length of material. And what you're going to do is there's a tri-glide in the rear, as you will see right here. And you're essentially going to put this on, see how low it rides, and then you're gonna go, hey, that's pretty low, I need to adjust it a few inches. You're gonna undo the material around the tri-glide. And then you're simply going to pull some of the excess material away.
And one way you can kind of do this is guesstimating, like, hey, I've got the same length from, you know, where I'm going to be cutting it off as far as how much material I wanna fold over and use. But you are gonna most likely going to have to like, put this on, see if you need to adjust it again, take it off, do it again, do it a couple times until you have it at a height that you like and that is reasonable.
In this case, I'm just gonna go, hey, these are roughly the same length, this should be good. I'm gonna come back over the top, thread through the tri-glide, back through. And I highly recommend you double back the tail through the tri-glide to prevent any slippage and to give you more security. So now this one, and we should be good to go. Now, many people have mentioned that this is sometimes complicated or hard to put on. I will say this is easier to put on when you have items in the actual cells themselves, just because it helps kind of structure this and it just kind of keeps it from flopping all around. What I like to do is I like to grab the front of the rig with both hands like so, so I know exactly what the front is. I'm gonna put my head through that, grab the rear cummerbund, and then that's just going to fold over the front cells and that is what it looks like.
Right now it's riding kind of low, but maybe that's where I want it for my shirt to fall over it and conceal it. I can always adjust it. And you'll see that the way that this is put on, you're always going to enter from the left side of the rig. There's no way to adjust it. It's always going to be an entry from this direction. That's just how the product is designed. If you're a lefty, you'll just have to learn how to put it on and use it, but it's going to be the same every time. So for consistency's sake, that's kind of nice. Now, when it comes to magazine retention, so the pouches are all fairly tight, or I should say they are quite tight. There's a few reasons for that. We want it to be tight with a metal aluminum based magazine. These are going to be the fastest when it comes to reloading, if you do want something like that.
So we had to make it tight enough to fit metal magazines, whether it's a 30 rounder or a 20 rounder, but you still can grab a 5.56 PMAG out just fine. And the other reason is over time, Velcro likes or elastic likes to expand and kind of loosen. And so we made it a little bit tighter from the get-go. So as it does wear in, you don't lose all of the retention. So this is what three magazines look like on here with it riding a little bit lower. Each magazine can be used quite easily, reload. It's nice and fast. It's elastic. So the retention is easy. Re-indexing the magazine is something you generally have to do with two hands. You're not going to necessarily TAC-mag into this. You're just going to take a thumb, magazine, insert, and you're good to go.
So let's go ahead and talk about pull tabs. So using our pull tab kit, you get three pull tabs, S&S Precision pull tabs, and three pieces of shock cord. This is already out of the packaging. And what you are going to do, you can buy two of these packs and just put them on all six. Or in this case, I have three. So I'm going to pick different cells for different kinds of equipment. I'll go ahead and do this pistol pouch, because I like to run a multi-tool up front. And I obviously don't want that to fall out. So what you're going to do is take your shock cord. You're going to weave through the front all the way through.
Spear through the pull tab on each end, just like so. And then I like to do one a little bit longer than the other, because we're going to go into the rear slot right there with just one of them. And then we're going to tie a knot. And then we can move the knot to the back. And there we go. We now have a pull tab to retain my multi-tool or my pistol magazine, and I'm good to go. I can add the rest. And let's actually talk about fitment in some of these pouches. So a pistol magazine. In this case, I have a Glock 17 with a +5 Arredondo plate. It's going to look something like this in the pouch. I will say this is tight enough that I probably don't need the pull tab for this specific piece of equipment. If I have something skinnier, like a multi-tool, that's where the pull tab comes in handy.
The middle pouch fits a 5.56 magazine just fine. So if you want to plus up and run five mags, you absolutely can for that heat load out. But if you're running something maybe a little more practical and you need communications equipment, a small civilian-sized radio works just great. It may sink down into the pouch a little bit, or it may kind of hang out here at the top. But it is there. You can push up. You can grab it. And it is pretty accessible. If you have a larger radio like this Motorola APX8000, it will also still fit in the middle pouch.
The pouch in the rear can fit all kinds of different things gloves and other types of equipment. But one of the products that we designed it around was the original EDC-ITRK. So this is a small, enclosed vacuum-sealed Medical pack that has a few essential items. It does not have a tourniquet, though. But even our newer design, which is a little bit larger, can still fit inside of this pouch right here, or this cell, I should say. And this is probably tight enough that I don't even need a pull tab on this. This should work just fine.
Now, one of the biggest questions that we get about this rig is, how compatible is it with aftermarket accessories, such as dangler pouches? There are folks out there that do run this basically like a super slick chest rig for the range. It is very stable to the body. You're doing full sprints with it. You're not going to have stuff like flying all over the place. It's just very stable to the body. And due to the construction of this particular product, you are not going to be able to mount traditional dangler pouches in a way like a standard plate carrier, where you drop it on and then you fold on top, because you'll see the Velcro is not lining up soft to soft, hook to hook. It's just not designed that particular way. However, if you want to attach it to the front, that is the part that attaches to the chest rig, you can do that. The only downside is, as you're peeling that away, you're taking all this equipment and weight with you. But that does absolutely work. It works for something lightweight, like a Wallaby Pouch. If you wanted to do something like that you could roll up and it would be nice and small. And then when you do need to put stuff in there, deploy it, and now you can stash your stuff in there, your stapler, your training stuff, or if you're doing other activities, maybe SSE, bag of fingers, whatever it happens to be, you have a place to put that.
An accessory that is pretty popular on these is our tourniquet holder. So this guy right here is a great way of running this is it can be used either side. It's got velcro and loop on each. So I can actually place this on this side of the rig, throw my tourniquet in. And now what that means is I'm not necessarily taking up this pistol cell here in the front. So if I want to run a flashlight in this one, I can do that, and I still have the tourniquet and the flashlight together. Another cool thing you can do with this if you want to, on the backside is soft loop velcro to accommodate certain kinds of accessories. One such accessory are matte pouches. So there are a few of these on the market. This one's from Shaw Concepts. This is generally used for a placard-style product that goes on the front of your plate carrier with all your other stuff. But in this case, because it's got hook and loop on both sides, I can take the hook side, throw it on the back. This is going to sit against the body. That's OK, because that is nice and comfortable.
So now I have all my equipment that I can have, my notebook in, my quarterback sleeve, maybe a chemlight. And I can have all of that somewhat accessible behind all my stuff. And if I don't want that, I can remove it easily. Just un-Velcro it. Take the front off and go ultra slick all over again. A 20-round magazine, just for you guys to be aware, is accessible. It's also very concealable, particularly on the sides. So you can typically run a 30-round magazine in the center and still wear a shirt on top, and it doesn't look too crazy.
The edges is where it starts to get kind of wild, depending on how big you are or small you are. If you are interested in carrying rifle magazines underneath a pretty thin shirt, like a flannel, that is something to think about. They're not the most accessible, as you will see here. But you can get to them. As far as compatibility with other magazines, every single 5.56-sized carbine magazine is going to work with this rig. 5.45x39 AK mags. I believe 7.62x39 mags will also fit, although it's kind of a really tight fit with those mags. But in this case, I have a Lancer 300 blackout, a metal 30-round 5.56 mag, and of course, a PMAG over here on the side.
Now, some of you watching this video will go, hey, wow, they have a black one now. And that is correct. When we launched this originally, we only had gray and green. We were actually trying to avoid black at the time. Since then, there have been a number of conversations that we've had internally. And we've decided, you know what? Black makes a lot of sense. There are certain kinds of t-shirts-- I have a gray one on right now-- where if you are wearing this on top of maybe a black t-shirt and you have a jacket on or something, it will just blend a little bit nicer with a shirt of that color. So we went, you know what? We should probably offer black as well. And it does look really slick. And it does conceal well on top of black-colored clothing.
We know this is an unorthodox product. It is not like other products on the market, especially when it first came out. This was designed for a very specific sort of niche use case, which is you want a really slim way of carrying some equipment-- not all of the equipment, but some equipment-- and a way of being able to carry that underneath regular clothing. And I've talked to guys who have these. And they don't fill them all the way out. They may not have anything in the middle. They only have a radio and medical. And then they're concealed firearm. But they have a way, if they need to quickly plus up, of running three magazines in the front, two mags, opening their shirt up and having it. So it does offer some flexibility in what you can do with it that a traditional chest rig like the TRAAP Rig or like the Quad Flap Chest Rig just doesn't do. This can do some slick, sneaky, secret squirrel stuff that those other products do not. But again, this product has its own limitations because it just can't carry a ton of equipment. But that wasn't the purpose in the first place. If you have any other questions about the Ready Rig and its compatibility with other products on the market or any other questions that were not answered in this video, go ahead and email us at team@trex-arms.com.