Took about 3 weeks after watching the yt vid in my other thread I had low expectations. I was expecting cheap feeling plastic helmet. Well it feels the same as my issued balistic helmet and weighs about the same.



No lable inside. Zero paperwork. Screw adjust. Size chart on the website seems correct.



Can see the mounting screw for the night vision bracket on the front.



I don't know what else to check on the helmet. Maybe pull one off the mounting screws to see if there are yellow Kevlar fibers under the shell?

For $138...idk...I'd have to either shoot it too see if really offers ballistic protection or just accept that i got a bump helmet for that price.

@dayphotog

Looks very similar to the other chinese helmets we've seen.

Hard to say how they all compare to eachother. Are they all the same? Some meaningful differences? not a clue...

thanks for the update and I put in an order for one too
figured use it as a bump helmet.

Took a mounting screw out. I see the blue paint underneath like the other ACH helmet thread.

Your dial retention knob is not supposed to be angled like that.

Goes through to top of the NV bracket

Canted a little because my thumb is pulling on the left side retention straps

I'm talking about the center knob that tightens and loosens tension. It should sit parallel with the housing. If you remove the screws from the housing, there is a little screw that holds the dial onto a shaft on the inside. I've taken mine apart before, out of curiosity. I ended up superglueing the little screw on mine because I wasn't impressed with how it was held together or convinced it would stay in place overtime. It's a tiny little screw that just threads into plastic.
I'm guessing your dials shaft is molded cockeyed or the screw is loose. Notice how my knob sits parallel to the housing.

Thanks for the heads up, looking at the knob now, it is pretty wobbly.

Wow mine came super quick
Heavier and better built than expected
Only qc issue is slightly crooked velcro

Attached File

Your adjustment knob looks better than mine. I got to get that apart and take a look.

Um, you absolutely need to shoot it, FOR SCIENCE!

ETA: Can we get 28 members to chip in $5 each to OP? I'd like to know.

It looks like one of those CPG/HHV ones that provided protection from penetration but performed horribly with BFD.

I've only gotten 2 commitments on that project so far so that's a no go for now.

BFD?

back face deformation

HHV had better BFD than Ops Core on the .44 Mag shot to the side, in the InRange video that has since been made 'Private'. Ian's synopsis was that all three would have done the job, the OC would look prettier at the end, but it failed the .44. Too bad they made it Private (or maybe completely removed it by now)...I wonder why?

Your N49 doesn't look like the one advertised on the site. More like the F70HC.

Opened the screw adjustment... Cheap snap together plastic. The screws that held the back on are super soft. Have to replace them to get it back together.

The chinese were making kevlar helmets, which performed pretty decently.  Then they started making poly helmets, which still stopped bullets but had terrible bfd.  now they think they have a new kind of poly that is better than the old, but the kevlar still does better in BFD.

@click2boom

Can you describe what you mean by poly helmets? How they are constructed..

Poly is ultra high molecular weight polyethylene (UHMWPE), which is stronger than aramid and lets you use less and lighter material to make a helmet. It isn't hard to make a ballistic helmet out of old generation aramids for pretty cheap if you don't care that much about weight, quality/attention to detail, and consistency in performance. All of the end product will be heavy, many of them will look like shit, and some of them won't work. But because people get shot in the head a lot less than they wear helmets, and normal guys (even LEOs) already don't wear helmets very much as it is, the overwhelming majority of faulty products will never be discovered. And even if a product does fail and kill someone, who cares? Working with polyethylene is harder. It's significantly harder when you don't know what you're doing, have a strict price and weight ceiling, and have to make your product be a mostly identical drop-in replacement rip off of someone else's product. When those design criteria dominate your production engineering, surprisingly performance can take a hit. But, again, this is all product for export to hostile foreign countries and there is no rule of law when it comes to scamming them, so who cares as long as the bank transfer clears?

You bought something you have no way of knowing anything about. Buy another one and shoot it if you want, that uncontrolled n=1 "experiment" won't mean anything because the production environment, materials, labor, etc etc could've changed between lots and you have no reason to trust any serial numbers or lot information from this random chinese factory, among other reasons. But it also probably doesn't matter because you are thankfully unlikely to get shot in the head. When/if you get into nods, after the second or third night you'll be replacing it with a bump or night cap anyway. I don't need my Ops-Core at all, don't take classes that require ballistic helmets regularly, don't even use the night vision that much honestly. It was a toy I could afford after thinking about it for a few years, so I bought it. Other people can't afford the toys, which sucks. The solution is to wait and get the correct thing. I don't have a Wilcox L4G24, MAWL, dual tubes or extremely light special threat pates yet, either.

It's really popular these days to rile people up with allusions to civil unrest and violence for marketing purposes to create a time-critical impulse "need" for body armor. Conveniently enough, there's a whole country of blindingly cheap, unaccountable manufacturing operations and an instant global communications and financial transfer system. It used to be that to start an import shop you had to be a jerkoff with enough capital to secure a line of credit and weather the first few years of carrying inventory and anticipating demand. Now, any jerkoff with essentially no resources at all can do it. And they do! Helps to wrap your LLC's marketing material in the milieu of your micro-targeted audience. Edgy 17-26 year old men? "nO CoMpLy" snake stickers. Older demo? Lots of eagles and patriot this and that and impressive looking discounts that never seem to expire for some reason. Rake in the coin. All this imported shit is so cheap that you can engineer dozens of little dopamine hits as people buy it bit by bit, each time reinforcing the feedback loop. A not insignificant number of your customers will also start doing your job for you. After all, they're in a great deal, they have to tell people. And it's so bad out there, better safe than sorry right?

Buy what you want, feel how you want about it. But the only person you're getting one over on here is yourself. You did not get the functional equivalent of a $1,000 ballistic helmet for $138. All of this chinese effluent streaming into the country is dubiously made by people who hate you and want you destroyed, sold to you by people who are at best fellow rubes and at worst scammers, and violates the intellectual property of fellow Americans and costs jobs. But it's cheap, and it's fun and cool to put on for a few pictures and look at in the closet afterward, so fuck it. If we keep it up, one day we're going to wake up and find the body armor/tactical gear/firearm accessories/etc market controlled by chinese manufacturing and kept accessible by "American" financial institutions and internet service providers. Rescind a few domian names, cancel a few commercial banking and credit card processing accounts, and that'll be it. Any companies still left innovating, despite having their IP stolen left and right, can be squeezed out or forced into selling to defense conglomerates who will only deal with the government. Won't take a single bit of malevolent (domestic) government action, and there's going to be almost no legal recourse for it.

And yes, I'll get it out of the way: I'm a hypocrite because I've got a cellphone, I'm just trying to "defend my purchase" (which only people who don't buy chinese knockoffs can do, apparently), Wilcox or Gentex or whoever gave money to a democrat PAC so why do I care about their IP being stolen, and one person can't make a difference so who cares? Dismiss away. I'm not knocking you specifically OP, and I'm sorry if it comes off that way. But people need to stop falling for any random drop shipped armor product that's hocked by YouTube shills or shows up on Facebook ads. You have not found the one magical deal that redeems it all. You are being played. If it isn't from a reputable company, let an organization with much more resources than you vet the company and give it a few years to suss out.

Wow....that was a lot. I don't have any illusions that i bought the equivalent of a team wendy helmet. I am however curious what its ballistic capabilities are and im just looking for input on that subject. However I do think i got a decent bump helmet that will take a shot from a brick or a rock and will be a decent platform for my pvs14 all for $138. And it looks cool. So there you go.

There's a reason all of these Chinese helmets look exactly the same: they almost certainly all come from the same factory. There are probably only 1-2 factories in China that make them, most likely just one.

If you go look at Alibaba, you'll find dozens of listings for these helmets. You find listings from at least a dozen different suppliers. What you need to realize is that most of those suppliers are actually trading companies and don't manufacture the helmets. They simply buy and resell them (and sometimes rebrand them) - just as the American companies do here. They're all basically the same though. The shells most likely come from a single factory.

That doesn't mean they're crap or won't hold up against the stated threats. There are lots of videos of them being shot and doing fine, and some companies actually do test them.

The real question - as is most often the case with Chinese goods - is the QC measures they take. There are companies that do independent QC testing of varying degrees before the items ship from China. Resellers in the USA may or may not do this QC testing. This of course adds significant cost, so your really cheap Chinese helmets most likely aren't getting any such testing. Again, that doesn't necessarily mean you're getting garbage, but the lots are more likely to have defects without it.

Most of the cost difference between these Chinese helmets and their American counterparts can be boiled down to lack of QC testing, no rating, and generally lower production costs in China. It's a peace of mind issue, really.

Same here. I have a few legit ballistic helmets, but I wanted a cool looking bump helmet on the cheap. It would be interesting to see what us manufactures have them made in China on the downlow

Listened to a podcast (had 'Close Protection' in the name, maybe 'Conversations in...') that had a helmet mfg on it - it's the guy that makes that full face ballistic helmet helmet that apparently some ODA's were testing out. Anyway, he gave a breakdown on actual helmet cost to the mfg, and the Kevlar 'Big Name' helmets, cost about $80 to produce. I mean AMP Arms... $100...really? LOL! No doubt there is cheap quality crap, and odds are they outnumber the affordable good stuff by a wide margin - but I've seen HHV and LAPG shot with my own eyes by InRange and Buffman - the performance/price value is out there.

EDIT: Just checked again last night - The InRange \ P&S video is back to being public, if you want to see the CPG/HHV/Ops-Core unscientific field shoot. TL;DR to the end, when you see all 3 sitting in the shack, for the final thoughts.

Someone shot theirs:

Idk anything about OPs helmet or the brand, but the helmet shot in that video is obviously fiberglass and not aramid.

Obviously it is fiberglass. The video poster claimed it was the C105 model which is $150 on topgentle's site. Just because a helmet had thickness and weight doesn't mean it is made with ballistic materials. Lots of ballistic helmet replicas have a "thick and heavy" version to mimic the thickness and weight of their ballistic counterpart but is made of multiple layers of fiberglass and are usually sold as such ("non-ballistic").

I don't know why people are trusting this site when none of their photos, videos, or documentation even belongs to them or are of their products. When someone actually dies or get injured using their products, they will just close shop and open up another using the same tactics to sell to people who don't know better.

ETA: even some of their reviews are fake and are pulled from other ballistic helmet manufacturers (albeit from China). Some of the C105 reviews were pulled straight from Militech's Aliexpress online store review section of their UHMWPE FAST helmet models, word for word, picture for picture. Their whole site is legitimately just a copy and paste and is just acting as a front while nothing on there is what you are paying for.