So the other week I went out to my farm to test some soft trauma plates. I brought three trauma plates and one standalone type plate in UL752 level 1 which is rated up to 9mm.
I wanted to see how trauma plates perform because they're not ballistic rated and are only meant to spread out the force of bullet impact on a kevlar vest and not meant to offer any ballistic protection but yet they're usually still made out of ballistic materials.
I've always seen videos of people testing body armor but they never test the trauma plate itself and I asked myself, do these things offer any sort of ballistic protection?
The trauma plates I tested were 5x8" Point Blank 0.25" thick, 5x8" Safariland 0.25" thick, some 6x8" unknown really thin somewhere about 1/16" thick made of polyethylene (which I've shot with a 1000fps pellet rifle a few times with no penetration, so it was kinda beat up in the first place), and a custom made 5x8" UL752 level 1 hard fiber plate I got from an ebay seller also 0.25" thick. (I got all the trauma plates from ebay)
I test them against a 45acp government 1911 with winchester "white box"
Tulammo 9x18 makarov out of a bulgarian makarov
22lr CCI mini-mag out of a savage 64
all at about 10 yards and leaned it against a large pile of dirt
The Safariland and the Point Blank trauma plates both stopped all the ammunition I fired at it with the 9x18 mak penetrating the deepest by approximately 1/5 the way (or just a couple layers if my memory serves me right) and turns out they were made out of kevlar. I shot the unknown thin trauma plate with the 22lr mini-mag near the middle and it stopped it as well as the 45acp. Unfortunately my memory of this thin trauma plate is very vague and also unfortunately for the thin trauma plate, the construction was splitting apart as it was actually two thin trauma plates overlapping 1cm of each other in the middle and the stitching came apart. I may have or may have not shot it with the 9x18 mak but I know it at least stopped the 22lr and the 45acp.
The UL752 plate fared well too. I'm a crap shot with handguns so I ended up hitting it a few times with the handguns in various places and it held up to all the bad shots I took. The material shattered like ceramic but only penetrated 1/3 the way with 9x18 mak.
Overall as long as the material is made of kevlar and polyethylene, it'll stop small/low velocity ammunition before it actually goes into your kevlar vest. Can't say much about how much trauma impact it reduces.
I'm sure that these plates are still useable after taking out the mushroomed bullet and resealing it with duct tape.
I was surprised about how the thin polyethylene plate performed despite how flimsy it felt. I just wish I had a 9mm (9x19) to test with and some other handgun calibers too.
One of these days, I'd like to test 762x39 against level NIJ IIIA body armor at 300-350 yards since the velocity at that distance is just about the same as 9mm at a few yards. Heck if I can find a 300yard shooting range on the big island.