Armored Mobility Inc: SAPI3 and TAC3 Plate Shoot
Jan 10th, 2011 | By Lee | Category: Articles
This review has been a long time coming!
A little background
Armored Mobility Inc, based in California, is privately owned by and really got into the armor business by chance. The business really seems to have sprung from a one off custom job and then they challenged for even make armor with even greater stopping power, thus AMI was born. We are glad it was, this armor exceed our expectations in every way.
Aggressive Defensive Solutions hosted the shoot with C2 Shooting Center in Virginia Beach, Virginia. The shoot was very well attended by local law enforcement from throughout Southeastern Virginia and North Carolina; also, we want to thank the guys from the FBI for making the special trip to see us.
Evolution of the Shoot
Ryan O’Neal, Director of Business Development at AMI, opened the shoot with a five minute sales pitch and background on the company, products, and their vision for going forward. What really impressed us about AMI is even as a small company they are not resting on current technology, but rather looking at revolutionary changes in their armor formulation.
Shots and Methodology
All of the actual shots were performed by Ric, AggDefSol. First, I want to say the goal of the shoot was to get the plates to fail, so with that said we were going to penetration even if we had to get out the drill press! We were amazed the first penetration (SAPI3) was achieved with the 7.62 x 51mm after 13 rounds! Try that with your ceramic plate.
Ric’s goal was to stagger the rounds across the plate to maximize the plate’s ability to stop multiple strikes with all the rounds fired from between the 7 and 10 yard line. We fired 23 long gun rounds at the TAC3s, including m855 Green Tip, without a single penetration! Switching to handguns we fired over 50 rounds of various calibre without penetration. Watch the end of the video to see how we tried to defeat the AMI TAC3S.
The total long gun on the SAPI3 was 16 with a single penetration as noted above. We subsequently fired 47 more handgun rounds without any additional penetration. Now determined to cause the poor SAPI3 with over 60 rounds to fail, we subjected it to another 7.62 x 51mm round which did penetrate and the final blow was two 300 win mag rounds which easily penetrated from 50 yards, as expected.
Conclusion?
The conclusion is pretty short and to the point. I don’t want to get into a gunfight, but if I do, I want to be wearing AMI armor. We fired over 150 rounds into two plates and single failure in each with a pretty beefy round that you are not likely to encounter on the street. The last three penetrations were our extra shots, and really if your plate had taken 60 strikes already, you are having a really, really bad day.
The SAPI3 and TAC3S plates ratings
| THREAT | TAC3S | SAPI3 |
| 7.62mm M80 NATO FMJ – 2780 fps | X | X |
| 5.56mm M855 Green Tip FMJ – 3054 fps | X | |
| 5.56mm LeMas Urban Warfare – 3718 fps | X | X |
| 5.56mm M193 FMJ – 3200 fps | X | X |
| 6.8mm 110gr OTM – 2625 fps | X | X |
| 30-06 M2 FMJ – 2736 fps | X | X |
| 7.62 X 39mm M43 Steel Core FMJ – 2307 fps | X | X |
Shot Table
| ARMORED MOBILITY SAPI3 plate 65 TOTAL ROUNDS
(2) sledge hammer Long Guns: (5) 5.56 55gr M193 ball Handguns: (7) 9mm 115gr ball Long Guns: (1) 7.62 x 51 (1 penetration) |
ARMORED MOBILITY TAC3S plate 97 TOTAL ROUNDS
(2) sledge hammer blows Long Guns: (5) 5.56 55gr M193 ball Handguns: (10) 9mm 115gr ball Long Guns: (3) 7.62 x 51 (1 penetration) |
