A few months ago, Petty Officer 2nd Class Luke Ott faced a problem: A new loudhailer needed to be secured to a patrol boat at the Baltimore Yard, but there weren’t any mounts in stock
As an electronics technician, Ott knew he could make one with a 3D printer, but first he had to design it. Working out the dimensions in his head and with the help of an app he found online, he spent more than a week on trial and error.
“I kept thinking, ‘This one looks pretty good. It might work,’” Ott said. “Then it didn’t, so I’d have to try again.”
But after completing a new Coast Guard computer-aided design, or CAD, course for enlisted personnel in July, Ott said he could now build the same model in 20 to 30 minutes.
“This is such a massive timesaver,” he said. “Having the knowledge and background to create an object is going to be incredibly useful.”
Ott was one of 16 petty officers across the country selected for the five-day pilot course, a collaboration between the Coast Guard Academy and the Industrial Operations Division.
The course was created to close a growing skills gap. As the Coast Guard expands its use of 3D printing to solve maintenance problems and work around supply chain delays, digital design has become increasingly important. But while junior officers often learn CAD through engineering coursework at the Academy, many enlisted technicians have not had the same opportunity.
That matters because enlisted members are often closest to the equipment problems the service is trying to solve.
“We were starting to lose their ability to provide valuable feedback, input and suggestions,” said Cmdr. Andrew Armstrong, an IOD branch chief, who helped launch the course.
The goal was to give enlisted personnel the same basic design language used by engineers and designers so they could better communicate ideas, contribute to solutions and, in some cases, build them themselves.
The 45-hour course, which was taught at the Academy in New London, Conn., took students from basic sketches to more complex three-dimensional models.
“We started off drawing lines and blocks,” said Guy Tharpe, a program manager at the Surface Forces Logistics Center, who taught the class alongside MK1 Morgan Clark. “By day five, they were doing much more complex work.”
The instruction centered on real maintenance problems. In one exercise, for example, students were given an actual part with no drawings or schematics and had to reverse engineer it by measuring dimensions, angles and threads before recreating it in CAD software.
For Petty Officer 2nd Class Luke Melendez, a machinery technician assigned to Coast Guard Cutter Polar Star, that practical focus was a major draw.
Melendez said he jumped at the chance to take the course because he had long been interested in CAD and could immediately see how it could be used in the fleet.
Three days into a deployment from Hawaii to Australia last November, one of the Polar Star’s boilers broke down, forcing the ship to return to Pearl Harbor for repairs. Melendez says one recurring boiler issue involves igniter probes that can shift out of alignment. After taking the course, his first thought was that you could use CAD to design a better bracket, use 3D printing to test fit, and then send the 3D model to a machine shop to fabricate.
“We’d have to test it, obviously, but it could be a good fix for that issue,” he said.
The SFLC’s Tharpe and Clark served as primary instructors for the classes, while Research and Development Center (RDC) engineer Shalane Regan taught students how to build complex assemblies. Professor Ron Adriesen, head of the Academy’s mechanical engineering department, also helped teach.
Regan noted that the course supported the digital transformation strategy outlined in Force Design.
“This isn’t just empowering these members,” she said, “it’s also aligning with the Coast Guard’s needs and where we want to see our workforce going.”
There’s clearly a demand for these skills. When the class was announced, it filled up so quickly organizers had to turn away 80% of the people who applied.
To make the training even more valuable, the team designed the 45-hour class to match a real college course, complete with graded homework and quizzes.
“We are hoping to work with the Academy on future classes to let them assign college credits for people who pass,” Armstrong said. "If we can upskill our workforce while they earn credits for degrees, that’d be a great win-win.”
To learn more or for information about potential future classes, please reach out to Cmdr. Andrew Armstrong at Andrew.Armstrong@uscg.mil.
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