​Royal Lee Organics is a subsidiary of Standard Process®. Since 1929, Standard Process has been dedicated to the field of nutritional supplements and the whole food philosophy introduced by Dr. Royal Lee. Royal Lee Organics provides organic ingredients as well as a re-designed version of Dr. Lee’s household flour mill that was originally designed in 1949.

When Dr. Lee first developed the mill in the 1940’s, he was concerned about what was happening to flour. In order to avoid spoilage, commercial mills were discarding the germ and the bran through a process called extraction, resulting in a less nutritious ingredient.  Dr. Lee provided an alternative, allowing bakers to purchase and store grains in their natural state and mill them at home when needed.  The result was fresh flour with all of its naturally occurring nutrients.

​The original Lee flour mills were manufactured by hand, and many of them from the past 50 years are still in use which is a testament to the reliability and durability of the design.  The previous manufacturing process, however, was expensive and time-consuming, so the engineering team made some changes to the flour mill in order manufacture it in a production environment. 

One of the challenges the engineering team dealt with involved the rotating disk inside the mill.  This disk creates an air current that rubs the grains up against the stone, an action that reduces the grains into flour.  This disk rotates at high speeds, between 5,000 and 10,000 RPM.  Anytime a component that rotates at such high speeds is out-of-balance, it will create problems.  The least of these problems is that the machine becomes louder, which is unpleasant for the user.  A more damaging consequence is that vibrations from out-of-balance conditions can cause early life failure of the motor.  For these reasons, the Lee engineering team spent a lot of time determining what to do about balancing these rotating disks. 

The team considered sending the disks to a third party for professional balancing, but that option proved too expensive and impractical.  Instead, the team developed a manufacturing process that produces disks that are true and round. This resulted in a component that is as “in-balance” as possible.  To verify this, the Lee Engineering team built a testing procedure using the DynaVibe GX2 system to measure vibration of the motor and rotating disk.  Now, the vibration level of every flour mill is tested before it leaves the factory, ensuring that they fall within the specification limits the engineering team developed through various trials.

​DynaVibe is helping assure that consumers are getting flour mills that live up to the traditions of quality and reliability for which the brand is known.  The full vibration spectrum and balance data that DynaVibe provides also gives the Lee Engineering team baseline metrics and set of benchmarks the team can use to further improve the design of the mill in the future.  With DynaVibe, there is certainty about how much vibration may exist and where it comes from. This helps ensure that the flour mills that leave the factory meet the standard of excellence.

To learn how DynaVibe can address your equipment balancing or vibration analysis needs, simply enter your email address in the box below.  Shop for a DynaVibe system in the online store, or contact us with your questions at 405.896.0026 or [email protected].

Props are every bit as critical to the performance of airboats as airplane propellers are to aircraft. DynaVibe balances both equally well, as the principles of balancing don’t differ from airplanes to airboats. The benefits are also similar:  less stress on the engine, the propeller, the mounts, instruments and hull.

Here are two stories of airboat prop balancing with DynaVibe.

An owner who had installed a modified 502 V-8 engine in his airboat experienced a problem on the 5-bladed prop he was using. After just 10 hours of use on the prop, the blades cracked, resulting in a catastrophic failure. Because the owner had balanced the prop at installation with DynaVibe, he had the diagnostic data to allow the blade manufacturer to rule out imbalance as the cause of the failure. Instead, the manufacturer determined that there wasn’t sufficient blade surface for the horsepower of the engine: the powerful engine was spinning the blades too fast. The manufacturer provided a new, 6-bladed prop at no charge to this owner. The new prop was also balanced, going from an initial vibration of .65 Inches Per Second (IPS) to .06 IPS on the final run. This owner shared, “It felt really good having the information from the DynaVibe balancing runs to go to the prop manufacturer on a warranty claim, which they quickly honored.”

Another airboat owner got help balancing his prop from a DynaVibe GX2 user. This airboat was running a Whirlwind prop on a Chevy engine with a Rotator brand reduction, and it was experiencing a pretty bad vibration in RPM transition at about 1/3 power. This initial balancing run revealed a severe vibration of 2.35 IPS, which after a series of balancing runs was reduced to .13 IPS. The GX2 owner shared, “At the last weight addition, it (the vibration) cleaned up significantly.” The following photo shows the balancing setup for this airboat:

DynaVibe owners can use their existing systems to balance airboats to get better performance and improve reliability. To learn more about using DynaVibe to balance airboats, call us at 405.896.0026 or enter your email address using "Contact Us" near the bottom of this page and a DynaVibe team member will contact you. Visit the online store to shop for DynaVibe. We welcome your questions!

DynaVibe has a long association with aviation as an affordable system for dynamically balancing propellers. The principles of balancing, however, apply not just to propellers, but any device that spins. The Alaska Department of Transportation is using a DynaVibe Classic system to keep brush cutting and snow removal equipment operating at peak efficiency. 

The idea to use DynaVibe came from an employee in one of the shops who was an A&P mechanic and had experience using the system to balance propellers and rotors.  Aware of DynaVibe’s ability to achieve precision when balancing, he started using the system to balance a brush cutter that had a rotating head.  When Lon Needles, shop foreman of the Transportation Department's State Equipment Fleet, heard about this, he asked this employee to come and demonstrate how it is done.

“This equipment will hit rocks and things and get out of balance, and it will shake the guys out of the cab,” said Needles.  The balancing demonstration was enough to convince him that they too needed a DynaVibe to balance the brush cutters in their shop.  Once the DynaVibe was in their possession, Needles began to wonder what other equipment they could balance with it.

“We have our snow blowers here,” continued Needles.  “Valdez averages 300 inches of snow a year; Thompson Pass, just up the road a little bit, gets 700 inches per year, so we use the heck out of our snow blowers.  If they hit a rock or something, it can mess them up, so we balance the spinning rotor in there with DynaVibe too.”  

The impellers in these machines are heavy, perhaps weighing as much as a ton.  “When they get out of whack, I’ve seen them sit there and bounce the whole head off the ground.”  Needles shares an experience about a brush cutter that was so out of balance that “it would literally shake the coffee out of the operator’s coffee cup.”  After balancing this equipment, “you could barely see a ripple with it running wide open.”

The value of keeping these machines in balance is less wear-and-tear – for both the machine and the operators.  “When a machine is not sitting there vibrating, it’s smooth; it takes the fatigue away from the operator, and while I can’t prove it, I think it takes the metal fatigue away from the machine.  Nuts and bolts aren’t trying to come apart.  It’s noticeable.” 

By spending the time to balance, Needles and his team are able to eliminate virtually all the vibration from the spinning components of their machinery.   The snow blowers are balanced about once a year; the brush cutters about twice per year or as needed.  It takes about an hour to balance a machine. “Anything that spins, we seem to be able to balance it,” Needles concludes.  

For a free, no-obligation consult with us about your balancing application, enter your email address below.