Review: Condor - Gen1 Battle Belt

This is my third Condor review.  I covered their Modular Plate Carrier recently, and had some good things to say about it, with a couple of caveats. My Condor Nomex gloves are still serving me well. Condor apparently gets a lot of stick in the high-speed gear community, but as a quite removed observer (damn you, Pacific Ocean), it's been hard to get a good picture as to why. I'm going to focus on what I see and feel myself. Both my Condor pieces are second hand, from a fellow who was getting rid of his excess collection.


This is the now superseded Gen1 Condor battle belt, which is still available out in the world, but Condor are promoting their newer Gen2 belt directly.

Adding to my growing collection of MultiCam, this 1000d Cordura belt functions in the way that must battle belts do, it is a sleeve type affair, and requires an actual belt to be fed through it in order to attach and wear it. I have fed my Propper 720 Riggers Belt through it. Internally, the battle belt has a series of webbing loops to snag and hold a belt in place, and fits up to a 2" belt easily. These loops keep a belt in place both in the donning and doffing process, but also when wearing it, to keep it riding right. The two front panels have openings in the bottom side to run a drop-leg rig off the internally threaded belt.

Four D-rings are set into the top of the beltfor attaching a harness or braces to.

The inside of the belt was lined with a breathability improving mesh padding, with two bands of non-slip backing. It was very comfortable to wear when empty, sitting on top of the hips and conforming to the curves of the body nicely.

Front View

The belt is surrounded by two rows of heavy webbing, 6 channels on the two side panels and 8 channels on the back. When you load the belt up, some things happen. Even with a fairly light load of a Platatac Half-Med pack and a WUP container, the belt sags noticeably.

Side view

Back View

This sagging didn't really affect the comfort, or the fit of the belt, but does raise some questions about its stability under higher loads, when you don't want that extra weight flopping about when you are being physical.

I suspect this sag is due to the Rigger belt being suspended through the middle of the Battle Belt, rather than riding up at the top seam, but it seemed like a design flaw to me.

I wore the belt all through last Easter's Confest (2015) with the loadout as shown here, with a Nalgene bottle in the WUP, with my RhinoRopework Hornet and American Kami Super Colubris combo fed into the left-hand side belt opening. It was super effective, and I chopped wood, carrier Tactical Baby and ran around like a mad thing with no trouble keeping my wearables in place. I'd like to see how it compares to the Gen2 Battle Belt, but it stands up nicely against the Platatac Young Guns and Bongo Battle Belts.