Two welders from Dixon and their supervisor at Fort Leonard Wood have made a one-star general very, very happy.
Brig. Gen. Thomas Spoehr singled out Chad Casey, automotive supervisor over welding and machine shops at the post’s motor pool, and welders Walt Perry and Sam Sharp during a June 12 ceremony dedicating a Fox chemical detection vehicle that will represent the Chemical Corps next to other vehicles from the Engineer Corps and Military Police Corps.
With 112 vehicles in active service, the Fox chemical vehicles are among the best-known symbols of the Chemical Corps. They’re designed to survive a hostile environment and protect their crew from both conventional and nonconventional hazards of the battlefield while detecting possible chemical contamination — or worse — in the area.
However, the Fox vehicle now on display at Fort Leonard Wood ended its useful life on May 29, 2004, when it was struck by an improvised explosive device in Iraq. After it was brought back to Fort Leonard Wood where it was once a training vehicle, Casey said he quickly realized the enormity of the task of turning it into a display for the Chemical Corps.
“If you’ve seen a block of Swiss cheese, you know what this vehicle looked like when it came in,” Casey said. “It was full of bullet holes, flat tires, very few usable parts.”
All that changed by last week, when Spoehr said it was one of the best-looking Fox vehicles he’d seen.
That took massive amounts of work, at least 18 to 20 hours per week by two welders, Casey said.
“My first impression was if we had about two years, we might be able to turn something out of it,” Casey said. “I’ve got some good high-quality welders and body personnel and we were able to turn it around in seven months.”
That time frame was crucial since Spoehr, who will be leaving Fort Leonard Wood for another assignment next month, wanted the display in place before he left.
Fox vehicles are rarely seen in the repair shops at Fort Leonard Wood. Spoehr noted that their heavy armor plating is durable, and even the IED blast that wrecked the vehicle wasn’t able to kill any of the crew members.
“This vehicle has a lot of armored metal in it, a lot stronger metal in it,” Sharp said.
Working with the heavier metal was a challenge, Sharp said, and the training role of the post means welders don’t usually see battle damage.
Sharp has worked nine years on post and said he enjoys his duties.
“The usual projects we get day in and day out are pretty much the same, but with the Fox, every day it was something different we had to do on the Fox, come up with different ideas to make different things we couldn’t get for it,” Sharp said. “It was pretty interesting in all how we had to fix it up and make it look like the original.”
Perry, a 21-year employee of the post’s motor pool, said a major challenge was the AR-500 steel armor doesn’t flex and bend. That means dents and holes had to be cut out of the steel body. Most of the metal is a quarter-inch thick and was hard to weld.
“We tried to make it as original as possible,” Perry said. “My supervisor did us a big favor. He found us a lot of parts, and what he couldn’t find, we had to fabricate.”