Bodyguard Armoring

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Wayne Brown, owner of Bodyguard Armoring, is a second generation craftsman. He began as an apprentice at his father's auto customizing shop when he was just 14. Over the last 40 years he has customized Porsches, BMW's and Mercedes, built composite boats from Kayaks to Jet boats, and armored vehicles used all over the world. He holds certifications as a "Class A" Aircraft welder, also ASE and ICAR auto certifications. In 1990 he began building armored vehicles as Bodyguard Armoring at the request of a customer who needed a "Bulletproof" vehicle. Since 1990 Bodyguard armored products, either vehicles, personal armor or architectural armor, have been in use here in the U.S., Mexico, Peru, Colombia, China, Haiti, Uganda, Nigeria, Israel and South Africa. By Marty Toohey AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF Photo by Ricardo B. Brazziell Monday, January 05, 2009 This summer, the police department in Maine's largest city loaded an aging assault vehicle onto the back of a flatbed truck and hauled it 2,100 miles to Central Texas. Police officials in Portland had heard about a guy who might be able to get the vehicle working again. His name is Wayne Brown, and over two-plus decades working in an East Austin garage, he had established a national reputation for turning the Jeeps and BMWs of the wealthy and the worried into armored vehicles. In a 1991 demonstration that made local news, Brown arranged for an Austin police officer to shoot up a Jeep that he had modified for a New York client. Neither a .308 sniper rifle nor an AK-47 fired at close range could penetrate the doors or windows. Later, Brown's work was featured on the Discovery Channel. "Nothing is bulletproof," Brown said recently, pointing to that Jeep door, which he kept, "but this will stop most common rifle bullets." Brown is rehabilitating a type of police assault vehicle called a Peacekeeper. The Peacekeeper was created by the Cadillac-Gage Corp. in the early 1980s for the Air Force, which bought almost 600 of the vehicles. The company basically made the Peacekeeper by cutting away the body of a Dodge RamCharger truck and replacing it with an armored cab. In the late 1980s, the Air Force gave away almost all of them to law enforcement agencies across the country, including the police departments in Austin and Round Rock and the Texas Department of Public Safety. By the early 2000s, one given to the Killeen Police Department was worn out. In early 2003, the Killeen Police Department offered an intriguing change: Take a brand-new, heavy-duty Dodge Ram 4x4 pickup, cut away the body, graft the body of the old Peacekeeper onto the new Dodge Ram truck chassis and make everything work like a new vehicle. "To the best of our knowledge, this type of conversion has never been attempted or done," Killeen police officials wrote in a 2004 letter to Brown. Killeen picked it up in September 2003. The department's SWAT team uses it every week. In 2006, Brown did a nearly identical job for the Rochester, Minn., police department. The U.S. Defense Department lists the replacement cost of a Peacekeeper at about $230,000, but Brown says he can rebuild one for between $75,000 and $175,000.

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