6.17.2005

Kitchen Builders Serve Up Safer Humvees

Going from welding salad bars to Humvee armor? Yup!

If there is a government building here in the nation's capital, said James Phillip Poole of American Metal Fabricators Inc., chances are his company has built its food-service equipment.

The Prince Frederick, Md., company opened nearly 60 years ago by Poole's father has even built kitchen equipment for the Pentagon and more recently for the White House.

But Poole's company stands out in another way: If there is a Humvee driving the sometimes mean streets of Iraq, odds are good that Poole's company had something to do with the protection of the soldiers inside.

In spring 2004, a military supplier with a long professional relationship with Poole approached him and asked if his company could produce armor plating to frame a bulletproof windshield. The supplier had won a bid to help bulletproof the glass on Humvees.

The two companies had worked together on past projects, but never on anything like the Humvee project. The Humvee plan would require that a 100-plus-pound bulletproof glass stay in place if the vehicle hit an eight-inch curb at 80 miles an hour, and it would also have to deflect small arms and shrapnel.

"We use a lot of glass to build salad bars," Poole said. "We've done a lot of government work, and some weird things, but none of this I would have imagined from the start," he said.

Poole agreed to give the Humvee project a try, motivated mostly by patriotism, but also fueled by entrepreneurial spirit and boredom.

"The norm is just salad bars. What's good about something that isn't normal is that it breaks the routine," Poole said. "You get tired of building the same thing."

Read the entire article over at the DefenseLink.mil site...

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