Many manufacturing facilities use equipment that contain rollers, idlers, press drums, and web-handling systems, and their alignment has a major effect on their efficacy.

There may be many rollers over which material passes as it proceeds through a specific manufacturing process. For example, in a laminating operation a substrate such as pliable plastic or metallic foil is treated and coated as it passes through a process line. If the rollers that transport the material through the process are not well aligned, the material can’t track properly and will wander off the machine, resulting in downtime and wasted material.

Roller misalignment may not be enough to cause tracking problems, but it is enough to stretch the material more on one side than the other, which affects how it’s wound on a take-up spool. It’s likely to be uneven and rejected for poor product quality. When a continuous sheet of material moves through a system of rollers, the left edge, center, and right edge follow similar path lengths. A misaligned roller anywhere in the system will cause stretching of the material at that location.

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