War Belt Continued: Safariland 6285 Purchased, Pouches Adjusted

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Have been on the fence about holsters for awhile.  While a lot of smart folks use them I do not really want to use a drop holster for this setup. A large part of the benefit of the war belt in my mind is that I can toss it on, clip one clip and have a ready to go load out. A drop holster doesn’t fit too well into that concept for me.

After a lot of thinking and looking at other peoples setups I finally pulled the trigger on a Bianchi 6285 which is a 1.5in drop duty holster with their SLS retention system. The gun going in it will be a Glock 9mm with a Streamlight TLR-1 which is my dedicated home defense as well as go to war gun. When it shows up I will get to fiddling, practicing then talk more about it.

I got back to fiddling with my war belt today. What I did was to move the stuff to be more compact towards the front. The frag pouch moved off the MOLLE to the duty belt (was zip tied to the Taco by it) which let me shift the taco’s and med pouch all up one row. On the other side my water bottle pouch moved a row closer to the pistol which eliminated some dead space.

Those moves let me put 2 pouches on the back sort of like Max Velocity’s war belt setup. After getting past a touch of jealousy that Max has FLIR while I do not his setup is sound so it bears a lot of consideration on my planning.

So the updated setup on my belt is as follows. From left to right:
-Frag pouch to hold compass
-2x double (rifle/pistol) taco’s
-IFAK in double mag pouch

Added today were 2x pouches onto the back in what was empty space. One pouch will probably be for sustainment in the form of 2k or so various bars, candy n snacks. The other could be plug and play depending on my needs or small admin stuff and my NOD.

-.75qt water bottle. Swapped out the 1 quart since I prefer it for everyday use. Need to order another one.
-Glock 9mm in holster. Apparently none of my holsters would fit the belt
and I can’t find any of the 2-3 kydex Glock holsters I own. Zip tied an
el cheapo fits anything Uncle Mikes on there for right now just to test
it out. The location is pretty good and the load balances well.
-Ontario Rat 3 knife ghetto rigged on with zip ties.

So far I’m pretty happy with this setup. It works well with an ALICE Ruck which was quite important to me. Also the thin suspenders under a plate carrier worked quite well. No issues getting to anything which was nice.

When the new holster comes I am going to shuffle things around again. Wouldn’t mind being able to carry 2-3 more mags if I could fit them. Freeing up 2 rows of webbing would let me put another mag pouch on which would be nice. That would give this setup a lot of capability as a stand alone rig. Since the belt needs to be pretty low to clear the pack it basically needs suspenders anyway so I might as well have some more mags.

[I was thinking on this then decided to pull my setup out to take a look at it. I think freeing up 2
more rows to get more mags on there is doable. Won't know for sure till I
have the holster on but so far it looks promising.] 

Thinking about how I am going to set up my plate carried I might just mount some mag pouches on there, slap on a camelback and call it good. Will have to play with the MOLLE II chest rig to see how it works with the war belt. I do like the idea of that level of modularity if stuff isn’t rubbing all into each other.

So that’s where things stand today.