Real Life "iron Man"

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After twenty years of development, spending his entire family savings, and over 750 hours of construction, Troy Hurtubise claims to have built a suit of armor that can protect the wearer against any attack. EXCLUSIVE COPYRIGHT 2009 EDIT INTERNATIONAL
PHOTO BY JAMES FORSYTH

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By Lance Laytner
Copyright 2009
Edit International



Who wouldn’t want to be Iron Man? The Hollywood blockbuster film starring Robert Downey Jr. tapped into something deep within us that longs to be invincible. Imagine being able to walk through fires, shrug off any blow and simply ignore bullets.

Troy Hurtubise, a Canadian inventor, doesn’t have to imagine – he’s done it. For the past twenty years the rugged Canadian outdoorsman and martial artist has used every spare moment being set on fire, beaten up by gangs of bikers armed baseball bats, picking fights with bears in the Canadian wilderness, and shot at by various military grade weapons.

But despite the incredible beatings, Troy remains unharmed. No, he does not have super powers. Like Tony Stark, the fictional creator of the Iron Man armor, Hurtubise’s invincibility comes from his skills as an inventor.

After twenty years of development, spending his entire family savings, and almost one thousand hours of construction, Troy Hurtubise claims to have built a suit of armor that can protect the wearer against any attack.

“This is The Trojan,” says Hurtubise in North Bay, Ontario north of Toronto, as he walks out wearing a hard black shell looking like a cross between Iron Man, a ninja assassin, and a giant black insect. “It is the first full exoskeleton ballistic suit of body armor.”

The space age looking suit of armor includes two magnetic hip holsters for holding death-dealing weaponry, a solar powered air-conditioning unit, laser targeting sensors calibrated to the wearer’s line of sight, a pepper spray capable of dispersing a mob of 40 people, and even a world clock with a readout for 20 time-zones unfolding out of the crotch protector.

Underneath the perfectly form fitting joints that allow for running or even rolling maneuvers, lies a mysterious substance of Hurtubise’s design called “shadow armor” that Troy claims can stop knives, bullets, shrapnel and even explosives.

But while Troy has yet to secure a military contract, this is by no means his first suit of armor. In fact, Hurtubise has done real-world field testing that would sound extreme even for a comic book hero.

When Troy was 20 years-old he was attacked by a grizzly bear. Although he survived the skirmish, Troy says part of him will always be frozen in time, seeing his own reflection mirrored in the hard black eyes of an enraged 680 kilogram beast.

That close encounter on August 4th, 1984 set Troy upon a quest for invincibility that he has pursued ever since. Hurtubise consulted physicists, biologists, and zoologists about the exact amount of force and dangers a human would face in a bear attack.

He set to work on armor prototypes using materials salvaged from his junk yard business and super strong composites of his own design. After seven years and $150,000 dollars, Troy hobbled into the world spotlight wearing his 140 kilogram Ursa VI bear protection suit. Troy is naturally 172 cm tall, but in the armored suit he towers at 220 cm.

Images of Troy wearing the massive armor while being hit by speeding trucks, standing in raging bonfires, knocked down by chain-held swinging tree trunks, and fired at with double barreled shotguns quickly became a sensation. In 1996 the Canadian National Film Board made a full documentary that is to this day a cult classic praised by mayhem fans. Hollywood director Quentin Tarantino, known for screen violence, highly endorsed the documentary.

But even fighting bears can grow boring after a while and Hurtubise eventually put aside his armored aspirations and pursued a host of other inventions for nearly a decade - until the Iraq War.

“I started getting calls and letters from friends of mine in Iraq and Afghanistan,” says Hurtubise. “They asked if I could help them survive I.E.D.’s (Improvised Explosive Devices). They wanted the strength of the bear suits, but with flexibility and lightness needed on the battlefield.”

Troy immediately went to work. “Well, I went back to my earlier designs. I did look at Star Wars and I looked at H.A.L.O. the video game.” Hurtubise believes that the best designs come from creativity, not just engineering prowess.

“Then I started talking to the professionals in the field: United States Rangers, Green Berets, and Canadian Special Forces. I told them what I was building and asked them what they need – what has to be part of the suit. They just broke in and started interrupting, saying ‘we need this, this, and this.’ And that’s how I went about the design.”

Hurtubise believed that this ground up approach, talking to the soldiers, rather than the generals or politicians, is what would make his armor succeed where huge military Research and Development budgets failed.

Hurtubise believed the key was to talk to the soldiers who really need a better way of staying alive on the battlefield. “The Brass doesn’t understand it and the politicians couldn’t spell war, let alone comprehend what these guys have to go through,” says Troy, whose brother was in the Canadian military for many years.

Hurtubise set about interviewing every soldier returning from the war zone he could find. “I got a Ranger coming back from Iraq. He said, ‘Troy, we’re getting killed with our face – we’ve got no protection for our face. Your suit goes full helmet, it looks good but we are in 120 degrees out there!’ So what do I have to come up with? Now the suit has got an intake fan and full solar-powered air-conditioning.”

“A sniper told me that one of the problems our guys face is when they get in an ambush situation with sniper fire the guy in front can see where the sniper is, but has no good way to signal back the shooter's location so he can be taken out. Well, I developed the solution with an eye doctor. When you put the helmet on, a laser tracking system that is perfectly centered puts a laser beam along your line of sight. All a soldier would have to do is order, “Follow the red dot and fire!’”

And the Trojan Armor conceals a few tricks Hurtubise picked up in his bear fighting days, too. “The Rangers told me that Black Hawk Down is the kind of situation they can face at any moment. Imagine one soldier left, out of bullets, with 40 insurgents coming at him with machetes.”

Troy drops into a crouch and flips open a spray gun hidden into the right forearm of his armor. “The way you stop 40 people instantly is the same way you stop a bear,” says Troy. “I learned the hard way there is no bear spray that is going to stop a bear because all sprays have only 1% Capsaicin,” says Troy, speaking of the stun chemical found in pepper spray. “Want to stop a bear or an angry mob, go for 3%. This is not the pepper spray police officers use. This stuff is illegal.”

Troy says he thought of everything, all he needed was the backing of the military. “We’ve already done the ballistic tests, I know it works. I’ll show you that our boys are going to walk out of these vehicles when a bomb goes off. I’ll wear the suit. I’ll show you what this thing can do!”

Troy was ready to go and said he could immediately start mass producing armor units for just $15,000 dollars. But so far he has had no military buyers.

And although Troy Hurtubise has been able to withstand being peppered by shotguns, run over by trucks, and thrown off of cliffs; he has not been able to fend off bankruptcy.

It turns out that the comic book creators of Iron Man were right to make Tony Stark a billionaire – invincibility is an extremely expensive hobby.

After seeing no financial return on his twenty year and $150,000 investment, Troy Hurtubise who dreamed of saving troops on the battlefield finds himself in need of a bit of rescue himself.

Hurtubise put everything on the line to build his armor and ended up losing his junkyard business and going deep into debt.

Troy even tried to earn enough money to support his wife and children by selling his first prototype suit of armor in an internet auction on eBay but the bidding never reached his $35,000 bare minimum asking price.

But Troy has not given up on his dreams and is already hard at work on his next suit of armor which he claims will be even tougher than all his previous suits. Once you’ve wrestled with a 850 kilogram bear, financial troubles just don’t seem so scary.


- The End -
Copyright 2009


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