Soft foot; what are you look at correcting?

Motor anchor bolt holes & feet area.

1 4

Jack

3 2

When checking for soft foot we normally loosen one foots anchor bolt at a time. A four-
footed motor works like a chair that will wobble whereas a three-legged stool has no rock
or soft foot. Hence, some machine are three-footed.

On our model; lets loosen anchor bolt #1 is there deflection? No! Move to foot #3.
Deflection? Yes! None at foot #2; OK. We have a relative simple correction problem. Or
is it?

Our 3-4 (blue line) diagonal is the soft diagonal. The 1-2 (green line) is the hard diagonal.
Since #3 was soft, will #4 be equally as soft? Maybe if textbook perfect. Our standard
tolerance is 2 mils (0.002). We like zero will settle for 2 mils.

Lets say we had 8 mils soft foot at #3. Since bolts 1 & 2 were tight the unit wont
respond in a linear fashion but some fraction thereof. With bolts 1 & 2 remaining tight
loosen #4 did the dial indicator show deflection and did #3 decrease in the amount of
soft foot? You may want to shim under both feet. Was #4 under 2 mils? If #4 was under 2
mils you can opt to shim #3 only. If so, you can tighten #s 2 & 4 and loosen #1. This
gives the greatest amount of machine flexibility at foot #3 and keeps the machine
basically at its present location (your particular machine may not allow this practice and
it may not be practical). Providing you have machine dimensions that give flexibility you
can jack at or near the foot to make the adjustment. As youve already seen, just because
you had 8 mils deflection doesnt mean that an 8 mil shim will make the final correction.

We can check soft foot as long as mass doesnt overcome stiffness. If mass overcomes
stiffness all four feet down on their respective pads and adding ~20 mils shimming to
one foot doesnt create a soft foot on an adjacent foot.