I'm Chris Sizelove, and this is the Universal Wire Loop. Blue Force Gear designed the Universal Wire Loop specifically to combat the problems of how do we optimally mount slings to a lot of different weapon systems in a lot of different areas, or even just equipment. The Universal Wire Loop was born of that need.

We have two sizes: this one is 3.25 inches in length, and this one is 6.25 inches in length, just for different applications. What the Universal Wire Loop is—a steel cable that's covered in a thin layer of nylon, captured by these two swage balls in a machined aluminum 1.25-inch width eyelet. This is where the sling goes.

To use these on anything, step one is you have to girth hitch it around whatever item you're girth hitching it around, and then attach the sling. For example, here's a decent representation. This is kind of a retro build of an older-school AR. There is no sling mount up here at all, so there's no way to mount a sling to it. Ergo, the fix is the Universal Wire Loop was girth hitched right around the front sight post, and now we have a sling that's connected to it pretty optimally. Alright, so that is a great use for it.

Another option would be on a more modern weapon system. You have a lot of options here; anything that you can girth hitch this through, you can put a sling. You're looking at all these holes and all these slots—these are just options for you to size your sling. If you want it all the way back here or all the way up here, or in the event that you only want to own one sling and a lot of different weapon systems, this will give you a lot of capability to mount them optimally to a bunch of different weapon systems.

To use it on something like this, same kind of concept: find a slot—there we go—girth hitch it back through the machined aluminum part, and that becomes my sling mount for my Vickers Two-Point Padded Adjustable Sling. Now that the Universal Wire Loop is installed here at the front of the gun and my sling is installed, we're solid; we're good to go.

To take the Universal Wire Loop off because you're going to put it on a different gun, or maybe you ran it for a day and think, "I would kind of like the sling mounted all the way back here," cool. Step one is remove the sling from the Universal Wire Loop, and now I can take this thing off. Boom.

Alright, so just to be clear, the Universal Wire Loops—either the 6.25 or the 3.25—only come in 1.25-inch widths. You can obviously put a 1-inch sling through them all day long; you're just not going to put anything wider than 1.25-inch slings through them.

One of the most unique things I've seen done with these—and we were playing around on the range—I have a friend who lost the genetic lottery, and he's left-handed. He also lost the genetic lottery in the fact that he loves AK-pattern weapons, so this guy's got multiple strikes already. His sling setup on his AK was pretty suboptimal. We started playing around with what could we do to really optimize a left-handed AK and the sling. Lots of different options; most of them required extensive surgery from a gunsmith or something like that. Now, I'm not talking about modern AKs that have rails and things like that—you can just slap a QD socket on either side—but like a vintage AK.

This is a technique on how we figured out how to do that, and it really shows how versatile these Universal Wire Loops are. So this is said vintage AK-74—no rails, no mounts; you just get wood gas tube, wood handguard. The sling mounts on these AKs are always on the left-hand side of the gun; apparently, everybody in Russia is right-handed. But if you are left-handed and you want the sling on the other side, this is a pretty slick thing you can do with the Universal Wire Loop.

Step one: take the guts out of it—take the gas tube shroud off. Step two: Universal Wire Loop through the existing sling mount on the right side of the gun, pull it as nice and clean and tight as you can get it. Step three: roll that thing through here, and step four is replace this guy. Alright, now what we've got is this beautiful sling mount that's on the right-hand side of the AK. Through here is where I'm going to attach this sling—got my triglide—yep, and now I have an awesome sling, optimal sling mounted to the right-hand side of the gun. The heat that's going to build up in here is not going to bother these Universal Wire Loops one bit.

Just a cool thing I found playing around with the concept of what are all the things we can do with the Universal Wire Loop if we just started applying it to these problem sets. Also seen these used to great effect with M3 Carl Gustafs, couple of heavy machine guns, things like that, because this is a steel cable, this is machined aluminum. But suffice it to say, to close the loop on Universal Wire Loop, it's a fantastic piece of equipment that you can use to solve some of your more interesting mounting solutions for slings and weapon systems.