Photo By Keith Hayes | Jason Braden, supervisor, AAV R7 line, tests the maximum capabilities of the...... read more read more
A military vehicle that first went into production 35 years ago is being refurbished and sent back to the field at Production Plant Barstow, Marine Depot Maintenance Command aboard Marine Corps Logistics Base Barstow, Calif.
In 1983, FMC Corporation first produced the Assault Amphibious Vehicle Recovery Model 7A1. It was designed to recover similar and smaller size vehicles to provide support to the vehicles in the field.
Although the AARV7 has been in use all this time, there has been no major overhaul of the existing vehicles, at least at PPB, since 1996.
“Production Plant Barstow hasn’t built or worked on this particular model in about 20 years,” said Jason Braden, supervisor of the AAV line at the MDMC facility. “In fact, until the first one of these was towed through the gate almost nobody here had seen one before. Right now I don’t have anyone in my shop who has worked on these. A lot of the AAVR7s were just not serviceable. Many couldn’t be started up, and the hydraulics on the boom arm and the winch were disconnected.”
The biggest challenge to renovating the AAVR7 is that many of the parts are no longer in production and the manuals for the vehicle are either non-existent or out of date.
“There are a lot of parts that we don’t have so we had to either fabricate them ourselves or send them out to be made,” Braden added. “For parts we couldn’t make or have fabricated somewhere, we’d take two or three of these AAVR7s and tear them apart to make one good one.”
The M88A1 HERCULES tank retriever is considered the gold standard of military recovery vehicles and can pull any other vehicle out of a jam, but it only deploys with tank units.
The AAVR7 deploys with AAV units and is capable of getting most of the lighter military equipment out of a jam, Braden explained.
“The lifting capacity of the AAVR7 boom arm is 7,500 pounds,” said Michael Stevens. He is one of the heavy mobile equipment mechanics working on the project.
“It can tow up to 38,000 pounds with its winch attached to the back,” Stevens added.
Unlike the HERCULES, there is no stabilizing boom or feet, so when it does its lifting, the vehicle leans towards what it is lifting.
“One of the tests is to pick up a 6,500-pound weight and do complete circles around the vehicle with the boom clockwise then counterclockwise,” Braden said.
His shop had begun working on the refurbishing of the AAVR7s before he became the supervisor of the line in May 2017.
“We finally produced one of the vehicles in February of this year and sold it in March,” Braden said.
When they first began the refurbishing process, they had to perform what is called a Proof of Principle, or POP.
“POP is a slow process,” Braden explained. “It’s documenting every step of the disassembly process, taking pictures, and then assembling it in reverse order so we can establish what parts we need and set up a steady supply of them because we are going to be building these in the future.”
He noted that’s where the technical professionalism of his crew comes in.
"However many hours we had actually (spent) putting the AARV7 together," he concluded, "you can multiply that by ten for the number of hours we spent on researching and investigating all the technical manuals, drawings, schematics, rebuild standards, and operational manuals. We’ve had our issues and trials and tribulations, but this crew made it a lot easier. They took the right pictures, took the right notes, did their due diligence, set up the kits and pulled drawings. I couldn’t pick a better crew.”
| Date Taken: | 05.10.2018 |
| Date Posted: | 05.14.2018 11:49 |
| Story ID: | 276918 |
| Location: | MARINE CORPS LOGISTICS BASE BARSTOW, CALIFORNIA, US |
| Web Views: | 272 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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