Patagonia Knee Pads – Gen 2

These are the 2nd iteration of the VIKPs for use with Patagonia combat pants.

Some years ago now I wore my 1st gen/style pads for a single day of gentle airsoft skirmishing and posted up my findings with the pads. Obviously airsoft is a game with little danger, I only did a bit of jogging, stationary kneeling etc and in a few hours of playing a casual game I split the plastic in the outer caps and had the press studs that join the plastic outers to the foam inners pop apart more times than I can remember. Without doubt the single lowest quality and all around worst item I’ve ever tried that has actually been issued (and in some quantity too) to US SOF. I also know the issues I found are not unique as I’ve seen tons of pictures and posts online of other people running in to the same things.

I am yet to try wearing these updated pads yet, but on the surface they appear to remedy my two main complaints. The outer cap is a far, far more pliable material and it connects to the foam with small catches that actually rotate and lock in to place with a quarter turn. The catches look still fairly thin and weak, but if any of you have tried doing anything vaguely physical in the depicted type of pads feel free to let me know in the comments how that went for you.