Because of my many years of experience in the field of installation and maintenance of rotating equipment I can say that installation is a fundamental thing. But why is this phase so important?
Well-lubricated and properly aligned machinery are integral to the smooth running and continual functioning of your equipment and overall facility. Shaft alignment of rotating equipment is particularly important, as the unnecessary stress produced by misalignment will cause unexpected and costly downtime.
Precision Maintenance can be used as a process improvement strategy. A strategy that will pay dividends. This process is easy to implement. In fact, you do most of the work already. The beauty of it all is that there is not a lot of cost involved and if you’re smart, you can implement the process on one machine at a time.
The five shaft alignment measurement methods are 9-12-3, EasyTurn™, Multipoint, Continuous sweep and the latest edition, Uncoupled Sweep. Here we describe them individually, so that you know when best to use them.
I saw this picture that was part of a post by Robert Lofthouse of Tremor Vibration Services on Linked In. I commented that “this is a classic and it will be bolt bound as well, it’s called reality maintenance”.
The ultimate goal for anyone in industrial maintenance should be to gain the optimum, full life of our machine assets. To do this we need to make changes to our current maintenance processes or at least the way a lot of plants are doing things. I see a lot of companies have some variation of a condition-based maintenance program but are scratching their heads on why they still get machine failures. They are not wrong in doing condition-based maintenance but that alone will not stop your machines from failing. First, let me explain why condition monitoring works.
