By Tom Henderson
Small Times Senior Writer
Sept. 6, 2001 — Seven years ago, Michael O’Dwyer was hardly the type one would expect to head a company winning $10.25 million defense contracts from the U.S. government.
He was a 50-year-old Australian shopkeeper, a former manager of a Woolworth store in Brisbane and an amateur inventor who was regarded as a bit of a nut.
When Wayne Downing, former commander general of U.S. Army Special Forces, first met O’Dwyer, “for about the first 20 minutes I thought he was mad, certifiably mad.”
“We all thought this retailer and grocer from Australia was a real kook,” said Art Schatz, a former Navy pilot who until recently worked for the Australian government in Washington, D.C., on behalf of Australian gun makers.
“If you understood anything about weapons, you understood immediately why this thing could never, never work,” said Schatz.
Both Schatz and Downing now work for O’Dwyer, whose electronic firearm with no mechanical parts was first displayed at an inventor’s show in his homeland in 1994.
“After 30 minutes, I realized that Mike had stumbled on probably the most revolutionary thing that could be done with firearms in about the last 500 years,” Downing said.
Downing is now a member of the board of directors of O’Dwyer’s publicly traded Australian company, Metal Storm Ltd.; Schatz is vice president of the U.S. subsidiary, Metal Storm Inc.
O’Dwyer had sold his food-wholesale business in 1991 to pursue his entrepreneurial dreams, burning through the $800,000 (U.S.) over the next five years. At a crucial juncture in 1996, private investors kicked in $1 million to pay for a six-month trial by Lockheed Martin Corp. in the United States.
Successful trials in the United States and Australia have led to total funding by the two governments of about $50 million, including the $10.25 million grant from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in March of 2000 and a $1.6 million grant in May by the Defense Science and Technology Organization of the Australian Department of Defense for a rifle that is being called an Advanced Individual Combat Weapon.
U.S. corporate partners include Scientific Applications International Corp., a Fortune 500 defense contractor headquartered in San Diego, and Alliant Techsystems Inc., an aerospace and defense contractor headquartered in Hopkins, Minn., that specializes in ballistics engineering.
In June 1999, the company went public on the Australian Stock Exchange in an initial public offering valued at $135 million and currently is in the process of applying for listing on the U.S. Nasdaq exchange. The company, despite its contracts, has yet to turn a profit, and its stock price has hovered at about 50 cents a share after hitting a high last year of about $1.50.
Despite the decline in share price, Metal Storm was named the Queensland 2001 Rising Star in May by the accounting firm of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Ltd.
With O’Dwyer’s handguns and rifles, bullets are stacked in the barrel, with explosive charges in between. A tiny metal cone in the front of each bullet expands slightly when the bullet in front of it is discharged, sealing off gases and preventing other bullets from firing prematurely.
O’Dwyer’s guns can be fitted with a variety of barrels at the same time, each capable of holding different calibers or projectile types.
One 36-barrel prototype gun has fired 180 nine-millimeter rounds at the rate of a million rounds a minute, say company officials. Conventional rapid-fire weapons are capable of bursts of 4,500 rounds a minute. Rounds can be fired before the previous round has even left the barrel.
DARPA likes the technology because, in theory, a sniper could fire off three shots before recoil affected his aim.
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CONTACT THE AUTHOR:
Tom Henderson at [email protected] or call 734-528-6292.