The customer needed to align a boiler feed pump to a fluid drive.

Before doing so,  we took care of the simple but often-ignored pre-alignment checks, including a thorough cleaning up of the area around the machines. The area was a mess to start with, and cleaning up allowed us to check for soft foot and start making moves immediately after taking readings, without delays.

Some of the essential clean-up and preparation tasks we performed were:

• Clean up the work area.
• Remove jacking bolt fixtures and wire brush the corrosion off them.
• Cleaning and greasing the hold-down bolts and jack bolts with white lithium grease.
• Drilled and tapped new holes in the base to add jack bolts where there weren’t any.
• Replaced dirty used shims with new precut stainless steel shims.
• Rough aligned the pump so its anchor bolts were centered in bolt holes of the feet.

This preparation work saved much time on the actual alignment, and more importantly, ensures that the next time this job must be performed the jackscrews, base, and anchor bolts will be in good condition, allowing the machines to be quickly and accurately realigned.