Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/476674
T TechNOlOgy www.vanguardcanada.com FEBRUARY/MARCH 2015 31 which is capable of quite sophisticated work, including creating hinges and clear plastic panels useful in cutaway models; and their most recent purchases, two ProJet 860s, which print by creating alternating layers of powder and glue and can be used to create maps that feature the actual contours of the terrain. When it comes to what the army can do with the printers, "the mind is the limiting factor," Batty says. As an example he points to the Land Force's larger effort to improve the Urban Operations Training System (UOTS). As new buildings go up at five sites across the country to better train soldiers at operations in built-up areas, the centre has created a three-dimensional scale model of the UOTS at Gagetown. "It's probably two metres by one and a half and the buildings might be three or four inches in height. You can take the tops off the buildings and see the layouts of every floor in them" so that before soldiers visit the site they can use the model to plan how they will clear the rooms in the each building. The centre has also created what Batty calls "a combat team in a box" – an aluminum case containing two to three inch models of all the vehicles found in a combat team: "16 to 19 tanks, and equal number of LAV IIIs or 6s," plus all the other support ve- hicles in the group. To help train technicians on the army's standard sniper rifle, it has created a plastic replica featuring a clear window of the fir- ing mechanism. And when an engineering sergeant approached the centre to see if it could develop a cheap model of an anti- personnel mine for his soldiers train on, they developed a mould of the mine that can be used to make models from a sand-based compound. They're cheap and readily replaceable. So do 3-D printers help save money? "That's a difficult road to go down. The machines do cost money but we believe that we have savings," Batty says cautiously. The 3-D models they create are based on work they have already done ("reuse and repurpose" is one of Batty's catchphrases). And by doing it themselves, "we get what we want the first time, exactly the way we want it. And we don't have to go through a whole procurement process." Ultimately, says Batty, "our goal is to modernize army train- ing." By developing these tactile, hands-on training aids, and getting away from a PowerPoint approach, "maybe we can train soldiers better in the future." The centre has created "a combat team in a box" – an aluminum case containing two to three inch models of all the vehicles found in a combat team. in soldier education, Batty cites the army's experience teaching bridge-building to aspiring combat engineers. "When I joined the army," he explains, "the engineers used to teach bridging by chalk board and overheads, and they had a wooden scale model of a bridge. They would practice using that bridge." Then when it came to building a real bridge, they would be aware enough of the challenges that "they would only have to build that bridge once. "Over time, the pieces from that [model] bridge went missing, the company that built the original model went out of business, and basically the model fell into disrepair." After that, says Bratty, they essentially started training would- be engineers with PowerPoint slides. Not surprisingly, it didn't work well. Worse, the lack of hands-on training was having an- other effect: "The pieces of the real bridge were being wrecked because the soldiers were not really used to them." To resolve that, the Army Learning Support Centre created a computer-based, virtual 3-D model for the engineers to train on. And using that as a guide, they were able to create an new plastic scale model of the bridge. "Now in the classroom, or even on the bridging site, they can rehearse like they did 25 years ago with the wooden one. [And] if a part gets broken or goes missing, they just send us an email and, for the cost of the material, literally just dollars, they have a new part in a day or two and the training aid is back up to 100 percent." The centre can also use its printers to make more cop- ies of the model cheaply, which could be used by engineer units for training all across Canada, not just at Gagetown. The training centre boasts four 3-D printers: a Dimension Machine first purchased some eight years ago, which is now use mostly to create "rough, small things where we don't need the fidelity," Batty says; an Objet Onyx 500, their current workhorse,