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Vibration Analyzer

supersonic7

Plastic
Joined
Jun 16, 2019
Hi, first time posting here, but I have lurked for years...

At an auction recently, I picked up a Vibrotip machine analyzer that looks to be used for analyzing vibration characteristics, bearing issues, etc., for rotating machines. Looks to be a pretty sophisticated instrument, and the ones on ebay are *asking* $500-$1000. Appears that most of em are being salvaged from ships being broken down in Asia.

Is anyone on here using such instruments for analyzing or doing PM's on their machines? I'm just wondering how useful you have found them to be.

Since I am at the hobby level, its not likely that such an instrument would make much use for me. Anyone have any thoughts on good/interesting uses for it?

Thanks!
 
I just bought/restored a late 1980's HP 3563A Dynamic Systems Analyzer (super, but old, spectrum analyzer - DC-100khz + transient recorder + 16 channel digital analyzer)for precicely that, as well as audio and other applications.
 
I'm gonna try it out on my tablesaw, which has an occasional whine, to see if I can test how the "detection" aspect of it works...
 
I was looking into things like that to see if it might be possible to balance the tire on a motorcycle (or at least the front) without having to remove the wheel from the bike.

Steve
 
The company I worked for did use vibration analyzers to setup machine PM routines. It was a long and involved procedure. When a machine build was completed part of the finalization procedure included bearing vibration measurement to establish a baseline. The bearings were monitored then continuously for several months.

Once a baseline was set the bearings were monitored on a regular basis to determine when changes started to occur. Once changes were noted they were again continuously monitored to determine how long they could be run before replacement was required. PM's were setup to change out the bearings at between 85% and 95% of the determined lifecycle.

The program was successful in that in over 20+ years we had gathered thousands of hours of data and had a 98+% success rate in determining bearing life and PM timing. There were always exceptions in that occasionally a bearing was defective, or an installation or PM was delayed due to unavoidable circumstances.

The upside was that in saved the company a considerable amount of money in lost production time and product. The downside was that it was expensive to implement. It was labor intensive to setup the system and required constant vigilance on the part of the maintenance organization.
 
I recently wrote this page- Home Machine Shop Area , sixth item down. I've never linked it here because it's more OCD hobbyist oriented, but if you can measure vibration at the frequency of rotation (filtering out other junk), you can do a 4-pass balance run on pretty much anything that rotates. Predicting failure or deciding to do maintenance is a different thing, but shouldn't be too tough. It's just a matter of deciding when too much is too much.
 
More HP 3563A

I bought the HP 3563A off eBay for $300, incl. shipping, with a dead CRT. It took a replacement X-Y CRT board to get it going, and the display is like new. These cost $20k back in the '80's and they are, like most of the other HP test gear of that time, really a marvel of engineering. With a couple of inexpensive piezo sensors and a View attachment 259116signal conditioner, this makes a great vibration analyzer.
 

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... establish a baseline...

Thank you for this great insight, projectnut! After reading the manuals a bit, it appears that the vibration, bearing failure detection functions are pretty dependent on establishing a baseline and then monitoring as you describe.

I found the rpm detection a bit more entertaining...
 
I like the electronic setup too. But I'm not sure I'm smart enough to put that system all together from scratch. Nor do I own a surface grinder at the moment. But I can say I used to own a small 6x12" SG and was never able to achieve a good grind with it. Never tried balancing the wheels, though.

I have had good luck balancing wheels on a lowly bench grinder. I was able to use two different balancing schemes and both worked. One is even completely automatic - all you do is put the balancing washers on the machine and they self-balance during startup. I wrote this all up in my usual clumsy way:
http://www.nwnative.us/Grant/shop articles/sharpTable/balancing

While my balancing methods are a couple orders of magnitude less sophisticated than the (awesome) method presented above, they have the benefit of simplicity, a worthwhile goal in and of itself.

metalmagpie
 








 
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