We have all been there… Late at night, trying to figure out why this quick alignment job has taken 20 moves and many hours longer than it was supposed to. After a couple of unexpected results during the alignment job the doubts start to creep in, is the laser ok? is the base ok? why won’t this repeat? We hear about this a lot and while there are many potential reasons for this one always seems to stand out…Angular Soft Foot.
It seems that many people are short cutting the angular soft foot check as part of the pre-alignment checks. We may do a cursory check with the laser (to save time) but never seem to handle angle foot properly. Any angular error on the foot will invariably cause the foot to walk across the base as it is tightened an loosened resulting in the erratic alignment results. Even if you manage to get the alignment completed, the angle soft foot will cause case distortion reducing the life of the bearings and on motors the motor, windings. We Must check and eliminate angular soft foot before we attempt the precision phase of our alignment. Here is one of our BITS micro learning pieces on checking angular soft foot. https://vimeo.com/418742364
Reliability Guru 