Product name: Troy Lee Designs 5955 Chest Protector
Price paid: £190
Score (out of 10): 6
Review:
Another Golden oldie from Troy Lee Designs. Like the 7855 it's also been around for 9 years - for the simple fact that it's good !
I'd discounted this from all my early research due to it's age and price. It's older than everything else and more expensive than everything else. Though I have seen it for €150 since buying it.
A hard plastic armour over shock doctor foam. Unlike all the latest versions from Fox, Alpinestars and everyone else, it's heavily adjustable, customisable and well ventilated.
The Outside view, laid flat :
Basically, the best chest, ribs and clavicle protection there is.
Inside :
Unlike all the competition, it has great ventilation on the outside AND on the inside. The shock doctor foam has air channels formed throughout to additionally aid in ventilation. I was a bit sceptical about these, but it does actually seem to work.
Looking out through the chest :
The various screws and caps don't seem to touch your skin, or if they do anywhere, you don't notice them.
The 5955 also comes with excellent shoulder protection and upper arm protection - but does unfortunately lack protection to the deltoids/sides of the shoulders.
The back protector gives good upper back coverage and is comfortable and cool (for a slab of plastic and foam). The bottom section "floats" so it doesn't press into you - but then equally might swing out of the way when you need it most. I've since removed this bit as I find it annoying flapping about.
The main downfall with the 5955 is the back protection is quite short - too short really for ideal MTB coverage. I've read of several people who've extended it, but do you want to be doing this when you've just spent almost £200 on protection.
This is the fitment guide. I went medium, but should probably have gone large - I think the shoulders would sit out slightly wider and the back would sit slightly lower down.
The top two chest screws and the top two back screws can be removed and the webbing sections re-located into three different positions front and back, so you can shorten and lengthen the front to back distance over the shoulders by about 6cm's in total.
Nearly all the panels can be removed depending on what protection you want or if you use a neck brace :
The screws are aluminium and quite soft. It does come with a tool to remove these, but you actually need one for the outside and one for the inside, so you need a screwdriver too. One of mine was obscenely tight and I damaged it removing it, the others have all been ok.
Fortunately, it also comes with a bag of spares :
A question I've seen raised a few times - can you wear the TLD 5955 over a TLD 7855 for ultimate protection ??
The answer is yes. Neither is too bulky and they actually sit well together. They also vent well together and are far cooler than all the other armour combinations I've tried.
Wearing in combination I removed the 7855 upper arm pads (as these are duplicated by the 5955), the upper chest protector and the upper and middle back protectors.
Amazingly, it all sits really nicely and is not restrictive.
As @dobbyhasfriends pointed out, it does also resemble the colonial marine armour from Aliens :
They also make a stripped down version without the upper chest, shoulders and arms called the 5900.
UPDATE : After using this in combination with the TLD7855 for a while, I eventually found I was de-hydrating too much. So whilst I wasn't hot and the two together were evaporating moisture and keeping me cool - I was sweating too much to achieve it. This was when riding in 32-36c temperatures. I've also dropped it from 8 to 6 as the back is simply too short to give proper spine protection and the lack of deltoid protection in the shoulders means that worn on it's own, it doesn't protect a lot of vital impact areas.
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