Remember when I made armor for the kids? I decided to see how effective it actually is. So I shot at it with a slingshot & filmed it.
I started with a naked watermelon and shot 3/8" steel balls on my Pocket Predator slingshot using 1" wide TheraBand gold bands.
Danger & I tried to measure how deep the shot went, but we completely lost the ball. We had to cut the melon open looking for it, and we still couldn't find it. We had better luck finding the 3/4" ball, which penetrated almost all the way through the melon.
No sign of the small ball
The big one went almost all the way through
Then we tried it with the chain mail. We took 5 shots with the 3/8" ball and then 5 shots with the 3/4" ball.
It deflected every shot and the melon only showed a little scratching. No dents and definitely no penetration. The armor itself showed no sign that it had been hit.
Before
After
I imagine if you wore this armor over bare skin, you'd receive 3 injuries:
- Bruising because a 3/4" steel ball going a couple hundred feet per second hits pretty hard.
- Scratching because the metal rings would get dragged across your skin pretty forcefully.
- Burns because it was 110 degrees out when we did this and that steel got hot.
The verdict: It totally works! This armor completely prevented the ammo from breaking the watermelon! Check out the video to see it in action.