Vehicle armor is sometimes improvised by vehicle crews or individual units in the midst of an armed conflict. In World War II, U.S. tank crews welded spare strips of tank track to the hulls of their Sherman, Lee, and Stuart tanks to break through the Normandy hedgerows after the D-Day invasion. In the Vietnam War, U.S. “gun trucks” were armored with sandbags and locally fabricated steel armor plate. U.S. troops in Iraq armored Humvees and various military transport vehicles with scrap materials, which came to be known as “hillbilly armor” or “haji armor.” Today, the U.S. is armoring vehicles to withstand modern conflict tactics.

Technical Weighing Services, Inc. is an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) that uses Rice Lake instrumentation and load cells in weighing and control systems for steel plants that produce flat carbon products; some for military projects.

Technical Weighing has developed a three-million-pound press, which is used to test, adjust, and calibrate the higher capacity force measurement load cell transducers.

The large capacity force measurement systems Technical Weighing developed played a part in the manufacture of the special armor-plate alloy that saved the lives of a military group whose Humvee was blown up by a bomb in Iraq. After the explosion, nothing was left except the armor-plate components and the personnel that the armor successfully shielded.  Modified content.