It takes three things to make a quality part.
1) Well designed and tested tooling.
2) Quality material being formed.
3) A properly aligned quality mill.
By using these three criteria, you can place your company in a position to produce quality product day in and day out. Items #1 and #2 take effort in the up front planning process for a product. Item #3 requires the operations personnel to take the time and effort to keep the equipment in first class operating condition.
In this series, we are going to cover the different types of alignment. We’ll start with the alignment during installation.
Installation
System alignments are critical upon installation. Most original equipment manufacturers will supply a foundation bolt plan, which places the equipment in-line based on the centerline of the operation in the mill. However, it is important to know whether your system is setup as a back edge operation or centerline operation. Back edge refers to the reference point being your shoulders of your mill or back edge. Centerline operation refers to the centerline of the roll space of the mill. Once this is established, the entry and exit equipment is set accordingly. The use of a string or piano wire is still very common. This is true since you typically have enough adjustment to account for equipment that is not as accurate as your mill.