A “Typical – Atypical” Alignment

A colleague and client of ours called, in a bit of a quandary. “Ever seen anything like this?” he asked.  I had to answer “No, I have not”. This is a C-face motor.  It is typically mounted to a C-face flange, which connects to a vertically oriented pump.  But in this case, the C-face motor…

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Fundamental Pump Laws

It doesn’t matter what size, shape or design of the pump its purpose is to move fluids. Head loss that must be overcome makes the task a bit more complicated and the type of pump makes a difference. Two of the basic pump laws are volumetric flow rate and pump power:   Volumetric Flow Rate:…

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Understanding and Troubleshooting Centrifugal Pumps

Choosing the right type of pump to meet your industrial plant’s needs is crucial to maintaining efficiency and prolonging the life of your machinery. Pumps are classified by the purpose they serve and the way they are built to operate. The most commonly used types of pumps are classified as centrifugal, reciprocating, and rotary. Centrifugal…

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Condition Monitoring Tools – How to Choose for Your Facility

Monitoring and maintaining the condition of your machines is essential to maximizing efficiency and prolonging machine life. You need human expertise and the right tools in order to have an effective condition monitoring program. When choosing from our suite of condition monitoring tools, it is important to look inside your toolbox and take inventory. To…

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Root Causes of Machinery Failure

As maintenance and reliability professionals we have a tremendous responsibility to keep the machines in our facilities up and running. As the entire world navigates through this pandemic, water, power, food, medicine and many other essentials have continued to be provided. Having the necessary skills and knowledge is critical to ensuring that we are able…

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Recycle, Recycle, Recycle

  Often times customers ask the question how can we keep it going? “How can I continue to train my technicians with the principles they learned in your class?” Craftsmen and women often admit we don’t perform precision shaft alignments often enough to keep our skills current. To this I say recycle! One of the…

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How Can We Help You-Let Us Count the Ways!

While hands-on training is best, sometimes technical support requires more. A recent blog lists all the different ways you can reach out to us https://acoem.us/other-topics/vibralign-training-during-covid-19/. A few weeks ago, a wind technician was attempting a precision shaft alignment in a GE 2.x wind turbine using a Fixturlaser GO Basic GE Wind. He was familiar with…

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Don’t Be Tempted!

Often the OJT portion of our training classes begins with an alignment check of a rotating piece of machinery in the client’s facility. This comes after numerous alignments in the classroom, on the training fixtures, performed by the attendees. They are then ready to apply their skills learned on the classroom training equipment in their…

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VibrAlign Training During COVID-19

Like many people worldwide, the ACOEM VibrAlign Training Team is grounded while we wait this virus out.  It is the right thing to do-for ourselves, our families, neighbors, co-workers, and nation. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t help YOU!  If you have questions about alignment, vibration, or reliability of your equipment, WE CAN HELP!  How?…

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Balancing How To #6 – Balancing Tolerances

By now, if you’ve kept up with the VibrAlign balancing “how-to” blogs, you should see that balancing is mostly just a math problem – counteracting forces.  But we haven’t discussed when the balance job is through. When I started balancing fans many years ago, I stopped balancing when: The fan owner said, “that’s much better”,…

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Generating Global and Special Reports in the NEST

Once you have moved your data back into the Nest, after a Route has been collected, you may want to provide a report or reports to different parts of an organization. The Nest has several ways of generating a couple different types of custom reports. For your discussion we will focus on a global report…

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Identify Gaps in Knowledge with the Smart Machine Checker!

At a recent Fixturlaser Smart Machine Checker (SMC) training class, one particular pump came up during the discussions. This pump has been “a problem child” for years. It had been rebuilt recently by one of the class attendees. The mechanic had rebuilt the pump “just as it had come apart” and was certain the impeller…

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How to Reorder Points in the NEST

Setting up routes is a very easy process in the ONEPROD NEST software and allows you to move machines into any order to allow for expeditious data collection. However, sometimes points need to be rearranged within the machine. Take the gearbox below for example.  Due to its size you don’t want to have to walk…

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3 Types of Mechanical Looseness: What You Need to Know

Mechanical looseness is a common diagnosis in vibration analysis. You will certainly run into it when you are monitoring your machines if you haven’t already. However, did you know that there are three different types of mechanical looseness? Knowing which type of mechanical looseness you are dealing with is essential to providing the correct solution…

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