Introducing Cave3D Training Boards: Rescue Rigging You Can Hold in Your Hand

Every rescue team has had this moment: someone's drawing a rigging system on a whiteboard with a dry-erase marker, trying to explain a 4:1 mechanical advantage with a stick figure and three circles, while everyone else nods along not quite sure what they're looking at.

We think that moment deserves better tools. That's why we're introducing a new product line at Cave3D: magnetic training boards — scaled, physical replicas of the hardware your team actually clips into a system, designed to stick to a whiteboard and move around as you teach.

What a Training Board Actually Is

Instead of drawing an anchor plate as a circle with lines coming off it, you place an actual scaled miniature of one on the board. Instead of describing how a progress-capture pulley behaves differently from a standard pulley, you hand two different pieces to two different students and let them compare the shapes side by side.

Each piece in the set represents a real category of rescue hardware — anchor plates, pulleys, descenders, ascenders, carabiners, and soft goods like prusik loops — sized consistently against each other so a system built on the board looks proportionally like the system your team will actually rig in the field. A magnet embedded in the back of every piece means it stays put on a standard whiteboard, gets picked up and repositioned in seconds, and survives a classroom full of hands passing it around.

Where This Actually Helps

Pre-briefings before live rigging. Walk a team through a full system — main line, belay line, anchor points, mechanical advantage — before anyone touches a rope. Mistakes get caught on the whiteboard, not on the edge.

Teaching mechanical advantage systems. A 3:1 or 5:1 haul system is much easier to understand when you can physically move the pulleys and see where the line changes direction, rather than tracing arrows on a flat drawing.

After-action reviews. Rebuild exactly what was rigged during a training exercise or incident and walk through what worked and what didn't, without needing everyone back at the actual anchor site.

New member onboarding. Give new team members a hands-on way to learn hardware names and functions before they're expected to recognize them by feel in a rack of gear.

Instructor prep. For anyone teaching rope rescue courses, having a board pre-built with a system saves the awkward minutes of drawing everything from scratch at the start of a session.

Built From Scratch, Not Scanned

Every piece in a Cave3D training board is an original CAD design, modeled to represent the general shape and function of hardware widely used in vertical and rope rescue — not a scan or a copy of any single manufacturer's proprietary design. We reference real hardware because recognizability matters for training, but nothing in this line is licensed, endorsed, or produced by any hardware brand.

Two Ways to Get a Board

We know not every team wants to wait on a shipment, and not every team has a 3D printer sitting around either — so we're offering this line two ways:

Physical kits, printed, finished, and shipped ready to use — the fastest way to get a complete board in your hands, with every piece to scale and a reference guide identifying each component.

STL files, available for download directly from the Cave3D store — for teams with their own printer who want to print exactly the pieces they need, resize the set for a different board size, or reprint a single piece the moment one gets lost under a truck seat.

https://www.soportescave3d.cl/products/vertical-rescue-training-board-stl-16-piece

What's Coming

This first set focuses on core rigging hardware — the pieces you'd reach for building a basic anchor system through a mechanical advantage haul. We're already sketching the next set around highline components and litter/basket rigging, based on what teams tell us they wish they could show on a board instead of a napkin.

If there's a specific device or system your team keeps having to draw by hand, tell us — that feedback is exactly what's shaping what we build next.

---

Ready to build your own board? Browse the physical kit or download the STL set from the Cave3D store.