We welcome you to read the previous blog in this series, “What is Machine Train Alignment and How Important Is It? Part 1”

ANALYSIS 1: ALL MACHINES IN THE TRAIN CAN BE MOVED 

Since ALL 4 machines in the train can be moved we have many options.

Option 1:

Let’s see what the minimum moves will be for the whole train. How we do that with the Easy-Laser XT770? We simply make ALL 8 feet in the train movable. NO LOCKED FEET in the train. See Picture 3 and Picture 4 below.

What can we conclude from those two pictures? A couple of things:

• What we see in the graphs is what we call: ‘The Optimized Alignment Line’. Simply the XT770 finds the Alignment Line that will minimize ALL MOVES. The proof that we are looking at an Optimized Line is that the SUM of the Absolute Values of the Negative and Positive corrections (moves) is the same. In those pictures, we see that the Negative Values add to 64 mils and the Positive Values add to 64 mils.
• We see that the big 172 mils move at DF2 is now only 6.4 mils.
• We also see that the biggest move in the train is at AF1 (Turbine Back Foot) only 31 mils.

Option 2:

For example, we can explore if we can minimize the Turbine move. The XT770 allows you to ‘Lock’ any feet. We Locked AF1, which was the biggest move in the Optimized view, and CF1 arbitrarily. See Pictures 5 and 6 below.

The XT770 calculates the moves for the remaining feet you are to move. As you see, not a bad option but not as good as moving both Turbine feet.

As mentioned above, in addition to moving ALL feet you can ‘Lock’ any feet to be able to analyze the best option. Going through all the possible combinations will make this blog extremely long torture for the reader.