Pentagon Seeks Small Firms for Its ‘Homeowner’ Projects

WASHINGTON —  If you know how to remove paint with a laser, the Department of Defense wants to talk to you.

Ditto if you can put a crease in fireproof pants. Have you built a better humidity detector? The Pentagon will beat a path to your door.

But you can’t be General Dynamics, McDonnell Douglas, or some other big contractor. Only small businesses need apply. Once a year, the United States armed forces draw up shopping lists of study projects they think small businesses might be able to handle.

Perhaps the most intriguing items are those that involve cutting-edge research applied to problems that average citizens face too. As the caretaker of hundreds of buildings, thousands of vehicles and millions of pieces of dirty laundry, the Defense Department is, after all, the largest Harry Homeowner in the country. On the 1990 Pentagon wish list: high-power paint stripping, better textiles and a “wind-up battery” to replace chemical batteries for backpack-size electronic equipment.

-- High-power paint stripping. You thought the closet door with eight layers of latex was a problem. Ever try sanding a tank? The Army thinks carbon dioxide lasers might be able to fry paint off armor and other steel items faster and more cheaply than conventional methods do.

The Army also wants work done on making things rust faster. That’s right--even faster than your old Swiss-cheese auto. Accelerated corrosion is not a new weapon to dissolve Soviet weapons into little brown bits. It’s needed to test 10-year rust-proofing methods without having to wait a decade.

--Better textiles. The Navy doesn’t think its fire-retardant cotton clothing looks natty enough. It wants a small firm to develop a durable press finish for the fabric. A five-yard sample will do.

And the Army’s fabric for its five-soldier tent wears out too fast. It “cracks and delaminates following short-term exposure.” A replacement should be fire-, water-, and weatherproof, and come in one pattern: camouflage.

--Climate control. Everybody’s got a damp basement. Even the Air Force. To keep military stores from mildewing, the Air Force is searching for a small business to make a better humidity detector for use in storage containers.

The Navy, on the other hand, takes a positive view of water in the air. It seeks a mobile unit for extracting drinking water from the atmosphere.

--Batteries. And for all those teen-agers whose Walkman batteries give out just when their Madonna tapes get to the good part, the Defense Department knows what you’re going through. It wants a “wind-up battery” to replace cumbersome chemical batteries for backpack-size electronic equipment.