For the past 2 years, I had been using these cheap paintball armored fingerless gloves while playing Airsoft. They provided plenty of back of the hand protection from bb hits, but no finger protection, and they weren't the best for grip. So when Airsoft Arms expressed an interest in me reviewing their new Tech Force line of gloves, I was happy to oblige. They arrived via UPS in late December, and I took them to an indoor CQB Airsoft game that weekend. Although it was so cold, we were unable to play for very long.. hardly at all really. It was long enough for me to get a basic idea of the performance of these very affordable but high quality gloves.

The palms of these gloves are made of a synthetic suede leather like material and provide for a fairly comfortable hold on a pistol grip or rifle stock. They have a slight amount of padding in the palm which should allow for perspiration absorption, but as its cold as... well its cold here right now.. I cant say how well the sweat will absorb. The back of the glove, made primarily of an elastic material, should be breathable enough to keep your hands cool during the summer months. Well as cool as your hands could be wearing gloves during summer while exerting yourself.

I got the medium size, and they pretty much fit me like... umm... a glove. OK all joking aside, they did fit perfectly, however the length of the fingers, considering the fact that these are half finger gloves, are bit long. You can see this in one of the pictures above. This is only a problem in the trigger finger, where the end of the gloves finger could possibly make it uncomfortable to get your finger into a trigger guard. Now I have had a problem with the fingers of gloves being too long on me before, so this could be a problem with my fingers being shorter than normal for my hand size. Therefore, you will have to just see how the glove fits your own fingers to see if it causes you a trigger guard problem.

The gloves have 2 adjustment straps, one for the wrist, and one for the back of the hand. Unless the back of your hand is excessively concave, you shouldn't really need the back of the hand adjustment, however, for the purpose of Airsoft, the Velcro strap on the back will make for a good shield to bb hits. The wrist strap has plenty of adjustment length, and I was able to adjust it to my very small wrists.

According to the tab on the inside of the gloves, they are made from a combination of 75% synthetic Leather and 25% Nylon. The fingers and palm are made of the synthetic leather, with the back of the hand being made of some sort of elastic material.

I had used these gloves briefly, So I had to test their durability in an accelerated manner. Using my experience as a quality test engineer, I devised a set of tests to see how tough these gloves really were.

The first test was a pull test. I held the back end of the gloves in one hand, and using pliers, pulled on each of the fingers. This resulted in no tearing or stitch fraying in the fingers. I repeated this test holding the finger end, and tugging on the wrist end. Again no tearing.

I then performed a similar test on the wrist adjustment strap and the metal fold ring on the wrist strap. No tearing. Finally I performed the tug test on the back of the hand adjustment strap. This strap and its Velcro are sewed directly onto a part of the glove made from the elastic material. When I pulled on it, there was a slight tearing noise. Further inspection showed a slight rip right at the stitch line connecting the Velcro to the elastic. Because this is a dramatically excessive test compared to actual use conditions, I do not expect this to be a problem.

Next was the Scratch Test. Knowing how many times I have scratched my own hand and fingers on brush and thorns while in the field, and knowing that I have torn clothing on such things I decided that it would be a good test to perform on these gloves. Rather than going out and finding sticks and stones to scratch the gloves with, I decided to just use a flat blade screwdriver. I scratched at both the palm and back of the gloves both on a hard and soft surface. There were no rips or punctures made during the test.

Through the results of this testing, I can safely say that these gloves can put up with even the most heavy use and abuse.