6. Register Your Vest
If your agency doesn’t fill out the warranty card and send it, you should. During the xylon vest recall, a lot of companies had a hard time reaching their customers because they hadn’t sent in the warranty cards.

7. Wash Your Carrier
You should have at least two carriers for your ballistic panels. This will allow you to wash one and wear the other. Keeping your carrier clean and dry will help your ballistic panels last the full five years.

8. Clean Ballistic Panels with a Sponge
The best way to clean your ballistic panels is with a damp sponge and maybe some gentle soap. You can even spray some Febreeze on them. But don’t throw them in the washing machine or dryer. And don’t iron them, not even on the lowest setting. You can’t iron out creases in that many layers of ballistic fiber, and the fiber may melt or even burn.

9. Hang Up Your Vest
Ballistic panels are made of many layers of bullet resistant fiber. If they get bent out of shape, they can’t be ironed or straightened out. “If you smush a sweaty vest into the bottom of your locker, it will dry in that configuration,” PPI’s Provenzano says.

10. What Is a V-50?
Is it true that your body armor failed to stop 50 percent of bullets at a certain muzzle velocity? Absolutely. That’s how it’s tested. Manufacturers fire high-velocity rounds into a vest until 50 percent of them go through. That’s expressed as Velocity-50 (V-50). V-50s are generally higher than the muzzle velocities of common street rounds. “You could conceivably produce soft body armor to stop the highest velocity rounds in each caliber, but it wouldn’t be very wearable,” says Safariland’s Geshay.

11. It’s Not a Swimming Suit
Going for a dip in soft body armor can be a bad idea. Some vests could lose some of their ballistic performance. “If a vest does become wet, water can act as a lubricant and that can help a bullet penetrate a vest,” says Provenzano. PPI and other manufacturers sell vests that have been treated with water repellent materials. Some ballistic materials such as Dyneema and SpectraShield are water resistant. In fact, they are used in the marine industry.

12. Kevlar Is Not the Only Ballistic Fiber
Today, Kevlar is still a very popular bullet resistant fiber, but there are now several dozen ballistic fibers and many of them are used in the same vest. Currently, the most popular woven fibers for armor are Kevlar and Twaron. Popular polyethylene materials include Goldflex and Dyneema. Another popular ballistic material is SpectraShield. It is a hybrid of woven and laminate with fibers encased in layers of polyethylene, i.e. plastic. Each of these fibers has its pluses and minuses. For example, wovens are more flexible than laminates, but they are heavier.

13. Your Vest Is Essentially Clothing
Most vests used by American law enforcement are sewn together with quilt stitches, tack stitches and other techniques just like your favorite shirt. They are inspected in the same way as your underwear by veteran garment workers who look for sewing defects.

14. What Is a Trauma Rating?
When a bullet strikes a bullet resistant vest, the kinetic energy of that bullet has to be dispersed across the vest’s fibers as rapidly as possible. The quicker it’s dispersed, the less trauma the wearer receives from the impact. Still, a handgun bullet is stepping out at anywhere between 800 feet per second (fps) and about 2,000 fps. So it will push the fabric inward as it slows down. The bulge that results at the rear of the ballistic panel is called backface deformation. The bigger that bulge, the more trauma the wearer will experience. This trauma rating is determined by placing the panel up against a tray of clay and shooting a bullet into the panel. The tes
ter then measures the impression in the clay.

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