Over the years we have fielded several technical support calls from maintenance personnel having repeatability and soft foot issues (during an alignment) all of which had a common issue; other influences. Meaning not the typical looseness, coupling backlash, soft foot issues. During the “heat of the battle” to get the precision shaft alignment job finished…
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Performing Precision Shaft Alignments on Cooling Towers present a unique set of challenges. A recent job is typical of what I find. We were originally called out because on three cooling towers the motors were experiencing high vibration. Some of the challenges include: 1 – Access through shrouds 2 – Ladders often required to gain…
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If you have not heard of VibrAlign’s Realigning America Seminar Series, you should. We have been hosting these seminars since 2013 focused on bringing alignment fundamentals to our industrial clientele in a short, half day, free educational event. Since its inception, these programs which evolve to meet customer needs, have been to roughly 90 venues…
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As a technical trainer for VibrAlign, I do a lot of reading in order to hopefully continuously improve. I am also very curious. Quite often I run across articles I believe are worth sharing. This article was on LinkedIn, an IDCON reliability and maintenance discussion written by Mr. Ken Latino. In case you have not…
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Every tool in your toolbox has a specific function and certain parameters of use to achieve a desired outcome. When you pull out a claw hammer, your intent is to drive or pull a nail. Pull out a ball peen hammer, it is still a hammer, however the use and outcome is different. You may…
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It really doesn’t matter the industry; industrial maintenance technicians suffer the same frustrations when performing a precision shaft alignment. Our team of trainer’s travel all over the country conducting training classes for paper mills, steel mills, chemical plants, gas and oil, etc. What we hear is universal across all industry. “I can’t get repeatable results,…
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When performing a precision laser shaft alignment, it is best to add or remove shims exactly as the display unit indicates. There are circumstances when this may not be possible due to your assortment of shims, or when you want to “fudge” your shims slightly to keep the total number of shims low. (Clink for…
Read MoreWe recently received a customer request about shim safety. An employee at the customer site had experienced a “near miss” safety issue due to walking too closely to a machine, and getting their clothes caught against a shim. Since I have a scar on my right thumb caused by a 3 mil shim, I thought…
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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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Simply put, L10 bearing life is the number of service hours that 90% of bearings will survive or conversely 10% of bearings will have failed. L10 life: is the preferred term in specifying bearing life and is defined by The American Bearing Manufacturers Association (ABMA). A bearing life equation is: This calculation assumes proper installation…
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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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This is a common misconception in some industries surrounding flexible couplings. Some maintenance and production individuals believe that flexible couplings are designed to allow for a few degrees of misalignment. This is not quite the case. While flexible couplings do tolerate some amount of misalignment, this is not their intended purpose. The greater the misalignment,…
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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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