Gearboxes are common in industry. They are used to increase or decrease speed from the driver, provide increased torque, and change direction of power transmission. There are two main types of commonly-used gearboxes: GEARBOX TYPE Parallel or Standard Gearbox-one where the input and output shafts are parallel. Bevel or Right Angle Gearbox-one where…
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Knowing the correct shaft speed of both shafts on a belt-driven machine is important when performing machinery diagnostics. Ideally you would do this by first identifying the input and output speeds using a strobe light, photo tach or laser tach. Once you know the accurate speed of both components, use this formula to determine the…
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A VibrAlign customer recently called, stating they were having repeatability problems with aligning a small motor to gearbox to pump. After some phone conversation, I asked if they could send me photos of the machine, and the discrepancy in the measurements. After seeing them, I knew what the problem was. Machines with small diameter…
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Proactive Maintenance includes a number of maintenance strategies, such as Precision Maintenance, Reliability Based Maintenance, Reliability Centered Maintenance, and Root Cause Failure Analysis. The idea is to anticipate and solve problems before they become problems. Reliability Centered maintenance would begin with a study done on a piece of equipment to gain understanding of all its…
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Predictive Maintenance, also known as Condition Based Maintenance or affectionately known as “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” also has its own set of pro’s and con’s. The pro’s: Rotating equipment usually gives warning signs before failure. Vibration level or pattern changes, rise in temperature, wear detected via oil analysis, performance change, motor current…
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So you received your new OneProd HAWK Supervisor or HAWK Supervisor with Balancing. There are some steps to follow to insure your instrument is configured correctly. Nest Set-up: You will need to make sure you are using only Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 (or higher) for the first connection and you will need to download MS…
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Preventive Maintenance, also known as planned maintenance, scheduled maintenance, calendar based maintenance, historical maintenance, etc. has its own set of pro’s and con’s. The theory is machinery has a life cycle. The probability of failure increases as the machine ages so maintenance needs to be performed prior to failure to extend its life and avoid…
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In the current highly competitive global economy we live in, there is always a drive to get the competitive edge. One way is to develop a maintenance strategy that will improve safety, meet production goals, increase uptime, increase plant efficiency and thus increase plant profitability. There are four basic maintenance strategies: Breakdown Maintenance Preventive Maintenance…
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As a Millwright, Service Technician or any type of field or in-house Mechanic, we understand there is one main goal that we have in common, which is to keep the equipment running. This includes repairing and minimizing downtime in the event of an unpredicted failure or breakdown. Although it’s important to make repairs and perform…
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Resonance is when a force causes an object to “resonate”, due to excitation of its natural frequency. Think of a machine coasting down to a stop. There are certain speeds in coasting down that excite natural frequencies of the machine components. This is often observed in the coast down of a bench grinder. As the…
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Past maintenance & production issues found in the industrial or manufacturing environment are still prevalent even in today’s equipment reliability focus. The major contributors to equipment failure remain the same, misalignment, unbalance and assembly errors. Another is lubrication, Mr. Stan Riddle addressed this in one his blogs “Machinery Vibration Problems part 3 – Lubrication”. Let’s…
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As my grandma used to say, “When you don’t know how to use your head, you’d better know how to use your legs”. Thanks to a feature on our FALCON data collector I didn’t have to call her to tell her how right she was (again)! Two of us were performing data collection on a…
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Mechanical looseness is a very common machine vibration diagnosis. It is often overused-becoming a “catch all” category for undiagnosed vibration. It can be caused by a multitude of things that may seem to have no relationship to each other, such as: Loose bolting Coupling looseness or backlash Belts Too Loose Cracked welds Improper bearing…
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This is a subject that comes up relatively frequently with our customers and observations from the field. The purpose of today’s blog post is to illustrate what can and often does happen. While misalignment can and does present with easily identifiable vibration signals; often it does not. Misalignment may be present in a machine, developing…
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Although shaft distortion due to misalignment affects more than just the electric motor, here are a few things that are a telltale signs you may have an alignment issue. In a perfectly straight shaft, the centers of each shaft cross-section from end-to-end of the shaft lie on a straight line. A shaft is bent if…
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If you’re working to maintain machines, Acoem USA wants to help.
We’re committed to providing tools, training, and services that will transform your approach to maintenance and reliability.
