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Mills Products earns Inventor’s Award for hydroformed heavy truck handle

Metal fabricator Mills Products, Athens, Tenn., has won the 2015 Paccar Inventor’s Award for a hydroformed stainless steel truck handle. The grab handle competed against submissions from Paccar’s global staff of 22,000 in the annual competition to identify the most inventive project of the year.

An option on Paccar trucks since its launch in March 2014, the hydroformed stainless steel grab handle helps reduce wind noise compared to the standard grab handle offered on Paccar trucks. Equipped with contoured finger grips, it can withstand more than 4,000 lbs. of pull force, exceeding the OEM’s requirements by more than three times.

Mills helped develop the design and provided the manufacturing method – tubular hydroforming – that made the handle’s realization possible and consolidated tooling requirements into a single step, reducing Paccar’s overall tooling costs for the project by 32 percent.