new old guy from Texas

[DHPmike]

Hello all. Im a 44 year old fabricator from Texas near Dallas. I have a day job building armored sedans, SUVs and SWAT vehicles. my home shop/business is building custom suspension parts ie control arms, 4 links, watts links etc for air ride.

Ive been doing the custom vehicle thing since the mid 80s. Ive joined several forums to get ideas, advice and give the same back to the scene.

[Ralph LoGrasso]

Welcome to the site, Michael. Sounds like you have a pretty cool day job!

[1971CHEVELLE]

welcome to the site

[D Impala95]

Welcome. I'm sure we'd like to see some of the wierd armored vehicles you have been a part of.

[DHPmike]

well the SUVs are Suburbans, Expeditions, LX470s, Land Crusisers, G wagons etc so they dont look any different than stock.

But the SWAT trucks are built to order. Usually that means they wont be that nice. Its when we get some creative license that we make some cool ones. the following were all ordered to spec. The last one had a fiberglass front end and the cab was armored. the customer backed out, another one bought it and had us make the new armored front end. I got to design and build the whole front end on whats basically a Freightliner special armored truck chassis.

anyway let me know what you think.

[D Impala95]

Looks cool with the water canon. What PD?

[DHPmike]

The water cannon was built to have in stock. It was a project started by some other company and then sent to us. we finished it for Alpine armoring. now Alpine has sold it to some agency in Honduras. we are currently covering it in white raptor bedliner and will be painting some of it blue.

The SWAT truck with the new front end went to Peoria AZ PD.

we also have another one of those with the fiberglass FL front end on it thats not sold yet. we also have several SWAT trucks that just got shipped to Iraq for the police. They are on F-550 and F-650 chassis. we also just finished 3 CIT, cash in transit trucks on F-550 chassis to go to Nigeria.

I do that all day at work and have a shop at home where I build custom suspension parts. The cool thing is that I have access to armor plate to make brackets and tabs with that are super strong. I design parts here on CAD or at work on CAD and then cut them on a CNC plasma at work. They just ordered a high def plasma/waterjet combination on the same machine. It should be very nice.

anyway I can also pretty much build anything there that I cant do at my home based shop.

I just made some adjustable tube arms with heim joints for a guy that does pro touring and thats what lead me here.

[Ralph LoGrasso]

well the SUVs are Suburbans, Expeditions, LX470s, Land Crusisers, G wagons etc so they dont look any different than stock.

But the SWAT trucks are built to order. Usually that means they wont be that nice. Its when we get some creative license that we make some cool ones. the following were all ordered to spec. The last one had a fiberglass front end and the cab was armored. the customer backed out, another one bought it and had us make the new armored front end. I got to design and build the whole front end on whats basically a Freightliner special armored truck chassis.

anyway let me know what you think.

VERY cool stuff, Michael!!!