Frp, Lasers Reverse-Engineer Old Gear:
The U.S. military is relying more and more on gear that’s older than the soldiers who use it, Photonics Spectra notes. Which means the companies that built the hardware — and originally supplied spare parts — may be defunct. Blueprints and documentation may be outdated, or have just plain vanished. So reverse-engineering firms, armed with laser scanners, are stepping in, to re-create what was lost.
[...]
Radian Milparts, out of Willoughby, Ohio, is making new M60 gun mounts for the Navy’s H-3 Sea King helicopters. The Navy “had a sample gun mount, but no manufacturing source, and no accurate technical data,” the company explains. So Radian scanned the mount, dumped it into the computer, and then produced fresh mounts — and blueprints — from the new, electronic design. The effort “follows an earlier, small program where Radian Milparts reinvented, documented and fabricated” an H-3 circuit board.