O'Gara Hess and Eisenhardt of Fairfield, Ohio, an Armor Holdings Company, is one of the main suppliers of armored HumVees to the military. Metal castings play an important role in the armoring aspect of the vehicle. The standard HumVee that we might see on the streets as well as the base un-armored military model use hundreds of castings, just like most automotive vehicles. However, the additional armoring and prep work of the vehicle for frontline activities uses a lot more critically important castings.

O'Gara Hess currently armors and preps 600 HumVees per month at it suburban Cincinnati location. O'Gara Up-Armored High Mobility Multi-Purpose Wheeled Vehicles (HMMWVs) such as the M1114 and its predecessor, the XM1109 (best remembered for its duty in Somalia during the early 1990's), have proven under fire that they can help troops accomplish the mission.

As the largest and most experienced wheeled vehicle armoring company in the world, O'Gara-Hess & Eisenhardt currently serves a wide range of commercial, corporate, government and military customers worldwide on five continents. With peace-keeping missions on the rise throughout the world, the need for rapidly deployable forces and highly mobile, well-protected, light, tactical wheeled vehicles has never been greater.

O'Gara engineers continuously apply new and improved technologies to satisfy the changing needs for personnel protection needed in various campaigns around the world. What began in 1993 as a single configuration of the original AM General HMMWV chassis has become a dynamic armoring solution for a broad spectrum of task-specific vehicle variants, each designed for a wide range of modern peacekeeping missions that often require varying levels of troop protection.

The M1116 Up-Armored HMMWV is used by the U.S. Air Force for Security Forces and Civil Engineering missions plus EOD and Base Recovery After Attack missions. This versatile armored light tactical wheeled vehicle system features gunner protection kit, traversing turret mechanism, expanded rear compartment and added underbody M67 grenade fragmentation protection.

A recent attack on a US vehicle is proof to the fact that O'Gara Hess is doing its job. One of the soldiers involved reports. "First I want to say that I am glad to be here today. As you know my M1114 UAH vehicle was struck by an IED on 8 Sep 04, while traveling on MSR Sword south of CP45 in Baghdad. The blast damaged the left rear quarter panel and tire, started the vehicle on fire, and caused the vehicle to swerve out of control. We then rolled over three times before coming to a rest back on all four wheels. As I have reflected over this for the past few days I am thankful for some of the safety measures that were in place that greatly contributed to our surviving this incident. The final outcome was that all vehicle occupants received relatively minor injuries and the vehicle was the key major loss as it continued to burn to a shell. CSM Jeff Butler, 16th MP BDE (ABN) Protector 7, Victory Camp, Iraq, September 29, 2004

An important portion of the armoring and prep at O'Gara is the machine gun turret assembly. This assembly is a prime example of how metal castings are being used to help save lives and defend our nation. The assembly, pictured below, is a 20 pound device that allows the ease of movement for the HumVee mounted machine gun. With the diversity of soldiers now serving in the military, operations of equipment must be made so that 95% of all soldiers can complete the task; the machine gun turret is an example of this need. The assembly includes 8 steel investment castings and one aluminum permanent mold casting.

As Bob South from O'Gara states "with increasing volumes of armored vehicles needed, it makes sense to look at castings to reduce our overall costs. Castings will be looked at to replace hog outs and welded assemblies." For instance, the advanced versions of the vehicles will feature an aluminum casting in the floorboard area to absorb impact from under the vehicle.