This paper describes the dynamics of capillary self-alignment of components with initial shift offsets from matching receptor sites. The analysis of the full uniaxial self-alignment dynamics of foil-based mesoscopic dies from pre-alignment to final settling evidenced three distinct, sequential regimes impacting the process performance. The dependence of accuracy, alignment time and repeatability of capillary self-alignment on control parameters such as size, weight, surface energy and initial offset of assembling dies was investigated. Finally, we studied the influence of the dynamic coupling between the degenerate oscillation modes of the system on the alignment performance by means of pre-defined biaxial offsets.