Needs To Be Stronger…
Weakness is no longer an option…


To hopefully help strengthen up the strap portion of the Back and Chest Armor, I will be adding metal reinforcements. I picked these pieces up at Menards…


To help reinforce the area where the breaks occurred I want to try using this wire mesh…

First, I need to add the reinforcement material to the break areas, so I cut a small section from the main roll…

I want to make the repair as strong as possible, so I cut a piece of mesh that bridged a large section around the break…

That piece of mesh was just too big to heat up with my soldering iron to get it to melt into the plastic, so I tried a smaller piece…

The smaller piece was also just too big, as well, so I had to resort to very small pieces…

These pieces finally worked, and I was able to get them embedded into the plastic…

I repeated the process on the other break…

The other pieces, fully embedded…

Now, for the strap reinforcements…

The metal is just a bit too wide, so I’ll need to trim it down a bit…

I trimmed it down with my tin snips…

The metal now fits the upper part, so I marked it for cutting at the bottom…

And, the bottom has now been cut…

The same process was used on the other strap…

I marked some spots on both metal reinforcements…

And drilled some holes to help give the adhesive something to grab onto…

To attach the metal to the Armor, I’ll be using this JB Weld KwikWeld…

I applied the JB Weld KwikWeld, allowing it to seep through the holes I drilled…

Then, everything was clamped in place. The KwikWeld dries pretty fast, I like to leave it clamped up over night for maximum strength.