A lot of maintenance employees believe that small machine trains can be precision aligned more quickly and easily than larger machine trains. This is not always the case!  Smaller machine trains are usually less rigid. This can cause the alignment to shift as the anchor bolts are tightened.  Almost all small machine trains have some [...]

Soft Foot has often been noted as the most inexact science portion of Shaft Alignment. Historically, when people think of Soft Foot, they often want to neglect, ignore, or otherwise do everything possible to not deal with it. This is one of the traps that leads down the path of bad habits, bad alignments, and [...]

Yes, pipe strain is soft foot! Soft foot means machine frame distortion. If you are missing shims under a foot and tighten the hold-down bolt until you have forced the foot down to the base, you will have distorted the machine frame. If you have severe pipe stress on a pump, and the anchor bolts [...]

The following tips are presented for consideration for when “the going gets tough”, meaning that problems like residual soft foot or “bad geometry” or becoming bolt-bound impede your ability to easily obtain an excellent alignment. First, a few definitions: Residual Soft Foot present: A bit more soft foot than you are comfortable with, but that [...]

“Does misalignment waste energy?” is a question often asked. The answer, emphatically, is yes! General Motors Corporation and Ludeca Inc. performed and published a study on this issue in 1993 which showed conclusively that energy savings (Real Power savings) of 2.3 percent could be obtained on loaded machines. On unloaded machines, the savings ranged as [...]

Thank you for joining us for our Webinar Detecting Misalignment through Vibration Analysis. We hope you found the presentation to be valuable and very informative. If you missed our Webinar, you can view the recorded version at any time. Watch now! Here are the answers to your questions: Q: How do you account for thermal [...]