Product name: Fox Baseframe D3O
Price paid: €100
Score (out of 10): 1
Review: I'm probably being unfair to this but it's been a pain even getting it and I now wish I'd not found the damned thing.
Wanted a well breathing base layer with shoulders and elbows to wear as is or with a TLD5955/TLD5950 as an alternative to the Leatt Armoured T and Leatt 6.0 elbows. Purely because it's easier and quicker to put one thing on than a tee and elbows.
With Cordura elbows and shoulders and D3O this looked like an ok compromise, especially for someone who likes to scuff trees with their elbows and shoulders !
It looks like this (in pictures) :
And on a man with no shoulders who's obviously never wrestled with an EMTB, looks like this :
I went for the Medium as this fits within my sizing :
It comes packaged in a nice box ..
The material seems ok, similar to the leatt, maybe slightly less airy.
Maybe it was incorrectly tagged and it's actually a childs XXXXXS .. but well, it doesn't work. I'm not hugely built and my wrists are certainly not tree trunk like, but I can barely get the wrists on my wrists.
It's certainly compression fit .. but sadly despite : "precisely fitting stretch fabric" - it's designed either for people with no arms at all or no shoulders .
The elbows fit ok. I could get used to the tightness and would expect the fabric to give in time :
Unfortunately, it all goes to crap from there .. The arm's are too short to the shoulders, so rather than a nice round D3O pad on your shoulder, you end up with this, a bit of a pad at the bottom of your delts and top of your triceps :
Contrary to the Fox pictures, the Elbow pad to the Shoulder pad is only 6cm's. That's with me standing on the cuff and pulling the shoulder.
I don't know about anyone else, but my tricep is more than 6cm's long.
Weirdly, in this photo with my arms up to hold the phone, it doesn't look so bad .. but it is. The shoulder pads just don't protect the shoulders. Without even a moment of consideration, this is the worst piece of armour I've bought. All of the leatt's, the racer, the TLD's - even the alpinestars ! Fit better than this.
The "cordura" on the elbows and shoulders is totally naff, I've seen harder wearing ladies lingerie.
What makes it worse is that I have shoulder injuries on both sides at the moment so I'm carrying considerably less mass than normal and yet it still doesn't even remotely fit !
Fox - what the hell are you doing ?
