UNIVERSAL FOR THE WIN!

REGULARS WILL KNOW THAT AT AIRSOFT ACTION WE’RE ALWAYS LOOKING FOR UNIQUE, INTERESTING BUT ABOVE ALL, PERFORMING GEAR-HAULING SOLUTIONS, AND SOMETIMES THE “OLD SKOOL IS THE BEST SKOOL”, ESPECIALLY WHEN IT COMES WITH A THOROUGHLY MODERN TWIST! DAN BRINGS NEWS OF A TOTALLY NEW UNIVERSAL MAGAZINE-CARRYING SOLUTION COURTESY OF KOMMANDO STORE. SO SAY HELLO TO OUR LATEST LITTLE FRIENDS, “PATTERN 84” POUCHES!

It’s a tale as old as time; you’ve got your requisite AR/M4, your AK, maybe an MP5, and now you’ve just added a new SCAR 17 to the mix. Excited as you are for the new rifle added to your collection, you glumly realize those AK and SCAR mags don’t quite fit your typical AR/M4 pouches!

Now you’re faced with the logistics of buying new magazine pouches to fit everything properly… except, you also hate weaving MOLLE, and the idea of swapping magazine pouches every time you change platforms is distinctly unappealing.

Of course, it would be more expedient to simply set up individual load-carriage solutions for each platform so you can grab and go with convenience… Red-eyed and with a Red Bull percolating in your veins, you spend countless late nights navigating websites, the shopping carts staring immutably back at you with an unsympathetic figure above the checkout button. This all seems markedly complicated now. *sigh* Airsofter problems, indeed.

Enter the “universal” magazine pouch, a proverbial jack-of-all-trades and master of none solution to your pouch woes!

As concepts go, this has been established for many years now, and indeed, some pouches, such as the G-Code Scorpion and HSGI TACO, have managed to pull off a bit of universality relatively well. But what if you want to carry more magazines than what these single-celled variants allow? That’s when you find your pool of options dwindling rather dramatically. I can remember ye olden times when HSGI dominated in this spectrum with their universal magazine pouch, capable of housing 3x AR/M4 mags, or 2x AK mags, or 2x 7.62mm pattern.

Said pouch is now long since discontinued and lost to time. Regrettably, I had sold my collection of these after a years-long segue where I traded sustainment for minimalism, but I’ve come full circle now, stacking mags and frags like it’s going out of style! To quote one our field owners service-time anecdotes: “Nobody ever regrets carrying more magazines.”

“PATTERN 84”, SAY WHAT?

Whilst again doing much late night browsing for a completely unrelated topic, I discovered the Kommando Store “Pattern 84” pouches by way of a YouTube mention. This reignited my interest in pursuing the idea of a quality universal magazine pouch that could house more than a single magazine.

The “Pattern 84” name technically encompasses several product offerings, including chest rigs and placards. The name itself derives its inspiration from the vintage South African Pattern 83 chest rig, but with some modern improvements thrown in to bring it into the 21st century. More specifically with this review, I am discussing the individual MOLLE-mountable magazine pouches.

These are manufactured from heavy duty 1000D NIR compliant Cordura, which is a bit of an anachronism amongst a tactical industry that has largely shifted to producing everything from lighter 500D Cordura.

The pouch features laser-cut MOLLE straps and columns, drainage holes, oversized flaps, copious bartacks and hook and loop construction. It’s described as being “bombproof” and I will attest that the quality of construction certainly is top notch and therefore lends credibility to that claim.

One of the features I really love is the tip of the flap has a cylindrical rubber insert sewn in. This provides great tactile feel as well as more of a “grip” for your fingers when you’re reaching for the flap.

Per Kommando Store’s website, these are advertised to fit up to:

• 3x AR/M4 (2 is recommended, but 3 can be pulled off).

• 2x AK 47/74 pattern

• 2x AR10 / FAL / SCAR 17

• Various types of pistol-caliber-carbine mags

• As well, taller 40-round style AUG and P-MAG’s, Surefire D60’s, etc.

That out of the way, does this magazine pouch hold up to the “universal” moniker? Well… yes and yes, but with some concessions. At its core, this is still an AR-centric magazine pouch, which is to say, it will of course work best with AR/ M4 pattern magazines and everything else is a secondary consideration.

It gets a little more nitty-gritty than that, so let me explain a bit further...

Around the middle of the pouch is a heavyduty elastic band. This serves a two-fold function of both passively retaining the magazines when the flap is lifted, but also to collapse the pouch when it’s empty. I’ve never really wondered why my pouches couldn’t collapse to a smaller state when empty (rather the inverse, I wish they’d stay open to make loading them easier), so this is of dubious value to me.

Back to the elastic though… this works well enough with smooth sided STANAG’s, albeit you will have more enjoyment if you use Ranger Plates or cords on your mags. With 2x AR/M4 magazines with Ranger Plates, extraction and insertion is relatively easy. If you wanted to overstuff the pouch with 3x P-MAG’s or STANAG’s, the elastic

“THE “PATTERN 84” NAME TECHNICALLY ENCOMPASSES SEVERAL PRODUCT OFFERINGS, INCLUDING CHEST RIGS AND PLACARDS. THE NAME ITSELF DERIVES ITS INSPIRATION FROM THE VINTAGE SOUTH AFRICAN PATTERN 83 CHEST RIG, BUT WITH SOME MODERN IMPROVEMENTS THROWN IN TO BRING IT INTO THE 21ST CENTURY” grips tight enough that you can slip your fingers off the mag base while trying to extract it. Again, ranger pulls are almost a necessity if you keep the elastic.

Unfortunately, this elastic band also proves to be a bit more of a curse with other magazines types.

As one example, the elastic is so strong that it will require two hands to overcome it and insert a second SCAR 17 magazine into the pouch.

For us AK guys, you’re going to immediately notice that it catches on the metal locking lugs, making for some painfully slow reloads.

I tried carrying my magazines in different orientations to see if maybe there wasn’t some “One weird trick!” that remedied the issue. I tried ‘rounds’ facing front, rounds down, rounds up, forward, reversed, etc. Some positions were actually worse than others, and if you didn’t have the magazines stacked just so and drew the wrong one, you’d also rip the second magazine straight out along with it. Anecdotally, I had ordered these primarily because I wanted a good double-stack AK magazine pouch foremost, so it was rather disappointing that the one thing I intended them for, they were in fact the worst at.

Loaded Up

I decided to try loading up the pouches to maximum capacity for a week and see if that helped to break in the elastic and make extraction a smoother process. This seemed to have very marginal effect on the process, however, and they still remained as tight as could be.

After I realized this would be a perpetual problem, I considered returning them and trying something else. Instead, I opted to take a razor blade and slice the elastic off the pouch… and boy, what a remarkable difference that made! AK, SCAR, even triple-stuffed AR/M4’s all slide in and out with beautiful ease now. More importantly, I am no longer fighting the pouch, but making it work for me. The only sacrifice (if you consider it one) is that it is now too loose for SMG magazines. Granted, I have long since concluded that the best pouch for SMG mags is an actual SMG magazine pouch, so I don’t really hold that against my modifications or the pouch itself.

The other thing I wasn’t terribly keen on was the laser-cut MOLLE strap. These work well enough, but I find MALICE clips to be more my style and they tend to hold the pouch tighter to whatever it’s mounted on too. Switching to MALICE also

THERE IS A SMALL LESSON HERE, IT WOULD BE THIS; DON’T BE AFRAID TO MODIFY YOUR GEAR IF IT’S JUST NOT WORKING OUT FOR YOU. ALL IN ALL, THIS IS AN EXCELLENT AND VERY-WELL-BUILT POUCH, BUT PERHAPS LACKING A FEW CHANGES THAT WOULD ELEVATE IT INTO TRUE UNIVERSAL GREATNESS” gave me some option to physically raise the pouch higher on my chest rig, whereas before it sat lower than I cared for.

MALICE clips can be woven into the existing framework and the laser cut straps tucked in behind the clip if you don’t wish to cut them off. This preserves the option to use either style of mounting down the road.

With these small changes in mind, I suppose if I were to wish for a “Gen II” version of this pouch, it would be that Kommando Store omit the heavy elastic band and replace it with a loop of shock cord and a cord lock. This would allow the end user to adjust for the amount of tension they want on the magazines, or let it out entirely. I have since sourced the materials and modified my pouches to have this feature and can confirm that it works well.

If there is a small lesson here, it would be this: don’t be afraid to modify your gear if it’s just not working out for you. All in all, this is an excellent and very-well-built pouch, but perhaps lacking a few changes that would elevate it into true universal greatness. I would still recommend it as a hard-use option for the player who fields a lot of different platforms that all use different magazines and especially for the airsofter who wants to carry more magazines on their person without consuming more real estate on their plate carrier, vest, or LBE…the caveat being that you may need to modify it to make it work better for you!

These pouches were purchased from my own funds and were not provided nor arranged for review by Kommando Store. AA