Rim and Face alignment (alignment in general) isn t all pry bars, wedges, sledgehammers, shims, swearing, and sweat. Sometimes it gets really ugly. Ever had to align a motor and gearbox assembly to a driven unit mounted upside down against a concrete ceiling? (Paper Mill in South Louisiana).

Yep, been there, done that roughly 30 feet from the floor. The really weird part was in not having to wedge the motor upward to juggle the shims. The rest was merely some careful rigging and thinking outside the box ,

The mathematics involved with shim and lateral calculations work the same there as in a more civilized setting but trust me, one is constantly cognizant of the 180 turn that gravity seems to have taken while performing such hazardous work.

Mostly however, a millwright s more difficult challenges in alignment work is pesky little things like ill-fitted pipe, prematurely drilled and tapped holes (almost) in the right places, and superiors who are convinced such problems don t exist. Also convinced the project that will take another week to finish properly should have been finished yesterday. Just pesky little details.

My most aggravating challenge in 1969 was in trying to develop a formula, or even a single-viable-method via the mathematics route to calculate an accurate shim package for any given motor.

Well, I beat the beast, but it took about 20 years to win that battle. And what started as the formulas for the motor in FIGURE 1 here in this Rim and...