At the beginning of April, soldiers from the Newton Aycliffe based REME Battalion (102 Battalion REME) conducted Exercise Engineering Challenge for engineering apprentices from across the North East of England. Engineering Challenge, a four day residential course is now in its second year and proving to be very popular with the automotive industry and apprentice providers.  This year teams of apprentices were provided by Nissan, Caterpillar, Komatsu and Reliance Precision and Sunderland College.  There was a new dynamic to this year’s event, with the Caterpillar team comprising of four female engineering apprentices, all volunteers and all wanting to prove themselves as capable as their male counterparts.

They were placed in a well matched group with apprentices from Komatsu, a rival company in so much as they both manufacture excavators and other plant!  As it turned out it was an excellent match with both sets of apprentices having similar skill sets that made them a well-rounded team.  This was borne out during the Technical Challenge aspect of the course, when they were the only team to successfully lift their vehicle and alight it as per the specification! The course was conducted entirely at Wathgill Training Camp this year and resourced almost entirely from battalion staff.  However the support provided by Outreach Team North on day two must be acknowledged, loaning us their facilities and members of their team to assist with the Command Tasks and Assault Course.

The course programme was coordinated by the ROSO, Capt Dave Hamilton, while Major Phil Cush designed and ran the technical two day phase.  The week was supported by SPSIs and mentoring teams throughout the week.  It would be fair to say the apprentices loved the course and that we got the balance just about right. Two days of physical and mental challenges based around a military programme, followed by two days of technical design and manufacturing, what more could a young man or woman want from a week with the Northern Craftsmen?  Oh yes, fun, so we threw in quite a bit of that too.

On Thursday afternoon 13 representatives from the companies named above watched their apprentices as they talked through the challenges they had been presented with and how they had dealt with them.  There then followed a demonstration by each of the groups of their finished projects.  There were a lot of crossed fingers as their models negotiated obstacles with a variety of control modules and then got into their lifting devices.  Given the time constraints and unfamiliar resources all teams did extremely well, though it is unlikely that Nissan will begin production of any of the model vehicles presented or that Caterpillar or Komatsu will roll out a new winch based on the examples presented by the apprentices.  It was extremely good fun and the audience were as enthusiastic as the apprentices as they encouraged their teams throughout the demonstrations.

For information about joining the Northern Craftsmen in Aycliffe, call us on 01325 375012 for an information pack.

Challenge 3 Challenge 1