Marines provide manufacturing capabilities to 3rd MLG

At Camp Kinser in Okinawa, Japan, Marines with General Support Maintenance Company (GSM), 3rd Maintenance Battalion, 3rd Marine Logistics Group (MLG), provide machining, manufacturing, and welding support to units on Hawaii, Okinawa, and mainland Japan to keep them combat-ready.

“What we do is important to the MLG because we provide support they can’t get anywhere else,” said Gunnery Sgt. Justin A. Horn, the GSM metal shop chief, regarding the capabilities offered to units. “With machining and manufacturing capabilities, we’re able to reproduce a lot of parts they buy through the supply system.”

From a waterjet to a 3-D printer, the GSM shop uses a variety of machines to fabricate parts and tools for temporary or permanent repairs for anything 3rd Maint. Bn. needs. In particular, the marines use the Dreamer Flashforge 3-D printer for quality control of products before they are made out of metal. Horn said they use the 3-D printer to test the fit, form, and functionality of an object as many times as necessary before it is produced, so that metal is not wasted. One kilogram of the material in the 3-D printer costs roughly $35; the same amount of metal costs 10 times more.

Repair shop machinists also use the CAD program Mastercam to produce metal work. This program sends a code to different machines, one of which is the TM1 CNC mill, which then reads the code and cuts the image out of a piece of metal. The CAD program allows the Marines to electronically draft and manufacture machine parts that are measured and scaled to the millimeter.

“My favorite part [of this job] is always having new challenges, different parts that are complex and hard to design, anything with organic geometry and things that we don’t have actual measurements for,” said Horn. “When someone brings in some stuff scrawled on a napkin or a part broken in half, that’s the fun part, trying to reverse engineer a piece.”

GSM makes many different parts for military vehicles and weapon systems in 3rd Maint. Bn., such as bolts, brackets, and hinges, replacing parts quicker and cheaper than would be possible through standard purchasing methods.

For Lance Cpl. Connor Bastarache, a repair shop machinist, being able to take a hunk of metal and make any part from scratch is his favorite part of his military occupational specialty.

“I feel like more people should know about machinists, welders, and the metal shop in general, because we’re extremely important,” said Bastarache. “Anything [someone] could possibly need that is made out of metal or needs to be fixed, we can do for them, probably [in less] time than ordering the part themselves.”