By Deron Jozokos with Shoreline Reliability,  LUDECA solutions provider for New England and Eastern New York

Yesterday I visited a customer at a ski resort for an alignment demo and he asked if I would demo our tools on his actual machinery, a recently rebuilt pump that was installed by a vendor. I readily agreed as I thought this would be a good opportunity to show how easy the tool is to use on his actual machinery. After setting up on the pump and motor, we entered the machine dimensions into the SHAFTALIGN® computer and took an initial alignment reading and soft foot reading, and saved the file “As Found”. In addition to a severe soft foot condition and misalignment, I pointed out some other issues with the machines. The shims used previously were undersized for the motor feet, and the washers used under the hold-down bolts were damaged and “cupped”. Also, on two feet the bolt holes didn’t line up with the foundation bolt holes which resulted in the hold-down bolts being cocked.

I recommended that we fix each issue, all of which could be done fairly quickly. We replaced all of the shims with new precut stainless steel shims, eliminated the soft foot, and slid the lower frame laterally so we could line up the bolt holes correctly. From there we re-measured the alignment condition and made the corrections indicated by the SHAFTALIGN system.

We took one last verification measurement and got two Smiley Faces which indicated that the alignment was now within the Excellent range for 1775 RPM tolerances. They were also interested in seeing the new TABALIGN® system in action so we downloaded the TABALIGN from the Google Play Store to their Android tablet, synced it to the same sensors, and took the measurements which repeated exactly the SHAFTALIGN results. They were very happy with the results but at the same time worried about the rest of their machinery which probably has many of the same issues that we had found on this pump-motor set. They’ll be correcting all of those shortly though!