In our previous post, we introduced machine geometry as a common "language" for machinists and metrologists to discuss precision alignment challenges. Defining machine components in terms of geometry allows each party to use terms and concepts everyone can understand.
I have a German friend who tells me that a number of local dialects are spoken across his country. These German dialects vary enough that communication problems sometimes happen. So when people from different areas find themselves having a hard time understanding each other, he says they switch to “High German”, which everyone is taught in school from an early age. This puts them on a common ground for communication.
If you work in the lumber industry, misaligned machines may be costing hundreds of thousands—sometimes millions—of dollars in lost revenue.
Poorly aligned equipment is a hidden drain on valuable resources and a major contributor to costly breakdowns, lost production and product waste. A fundamental requirement for optimizing sawmill machinery is precision alignment. It is also one of the most overlooked activities in a mill. In this blog post, we'll discuss how proper alignment can uncover these hidden costs to add new revenue to your bottom line.
Everybody wants to get in on the best kept secrets, right? Well, we'd like to share one of ours with you. While we haven't been real vocal about it, our expert field technicians have quietly been serving the industrial marketplace for decades, transforming one process after another by working directly with our customers to provide the machine alignments that are critical to their success.
Today, we are making this expertise accessible to everyone. BrunsonAlignment.com is our new alignment services website, providing a direct connection to our Technical Services group for on-site machine inspection and precision alignment solutions.
One of the conditions encountered when using telescopes is parallax. To perform optical alignments properly, you should have a clear understanding of parallax and the procedures used to eliminate it.
Parallax exists when the two lens systems of a telescope (the objective system and the ocular system) are not both focused on the reticle plane. You can check for parallax by moving your head up and down as you look through the scope. If you see relative motion between the reticle pattern and the target, you should correct the parallax by properly focusing the ocular and objective lens systems.
The view of parallel rolls is a beautiful thing - and not just the rolls that often accompany your favorite pasta dish! We're talking about industrial rolls. When they're precisely parallel, they produce faster throughput, higher quality, and more uptime.
Rolls that are not precisely parallel might result in problems like:
We're often asked how to make rolls (or other components) parallel. One way to approach the job would be like this:
Over the last 18 months, quite a few sawmills have invited Brunson’s service group to perform a line-up and/or have purchased our Sawmill Kit and training. One timber manufacturer purchased Sawmill Kits for 12 mills, and will be installing even more kits in the future. Eight of the top twelve lumber producers in North America have asked us to perform line-ups in their mills using our optical alignment technology.
What are we hearing from these customers? The mills which are implementing the Sawmill Kit solution into their regular preventative maintenance programs have been the most successful. Some of the results we have seen include a reduction in board deviation by over 50% - and improvements in recovery up to 2.6%. A couple of customers have shared that these results delivered annualized savings of $500,000 to $1,000,000.
Over the last couple of years, we have worked closely with respected sawmill industry consultant and alignment specialists, looking at the challenges of common machine center alignments in sawmills. This includes aligning chip-n-saw lines, gang & board edgers, overhead endoggers, sharp chains, head rigs, track and rails, band mills, sash gangs, horizontal resaws, planers, trimmers and others, in primary and secondary breakdowns.
