My thoughts precisely! If you don't do soft-foot first you are guessing which way and how far the machine will rock when you do the bolts up each time. Doing soft-foot at the end undermines the adjustments you have already done.
There is a 'live trend" mode in the Rotalign version which plots the X,Y movement whilst the machine is operating, provided the laser transducer are are mounted on the 'housing' (and not the shaft of course) using magnetic brackets. With this instrument if you again mounted the transducers on the housing you can observe the aligment change as the machines heat up, and compensate with shims accordingly. This of course is from someone who has only read the manual and not actually been out on site actually doing aligments!!
It does have a thermal growth function. Yes I agree, these instruments have not changed a heap in 22 years except for how they report and the communications between the instrument and the transducer. i.e. Bluetooth. We have an instrument which is more than 20 years old and its very very similar except for the reporting!
@@GraemeMurphy54 Yes i agree Murphy - after I wrote the question - i did dive deep into the models they offer and got to test out 2 systems too. They can do a lot of stuff & functions and chose views etc. but even upgrading to sense-7 software does not do more than the originals from Hamar Laser - they are actually more complicated to use. So i'm not impressed anymore. I thought PT actually had done some smart stuff - calling their systems intelligent, but everything is more or less a copy ( even colorsbars ) of the Hamar Lasers Uni-Directional Wireless Touch units from 1990 ( worlds first a lot of things ), - so it just means the competition thinks to Hamar Laser are intelligent ! That Uni-D 3 axis system S-640 got its first 5 axis LSA tool S-650 as a big brother already in 1998. 10-11 years later the germans also had a 5 axis system but with small sensor and bad precision. All was changed 2008 in outer design and communications to BT from first FM-radio (1990) to wireless in 1998, and windows required the new softwares 2008. But basically these 2 systems are still ruling the shaft alignment world in precisions & read misalignments on even 10 deg without doing any pre-alignments and also Hamar has zero need at all to use 20 min to align the target head to the single laser beam they only have with an inclinometer too ( they use 2 of them). Hamar uses single sensor technology and no inclinometers and keeps references due to 2 tandem flashing ultra thin laser beams shining out from the stationary machine only. This gives ultra precision - 0.15% only offset measuring error, which is 6.667 times better than any other out there. The best is that the originals even the best - cost only about the half. In early Autumn 2021 Hamar will launch 4 new models - wait for those and save big bucks! 1 thing to note is the systems with crossfire shaft lasers systems, models which send out a laser from the movable machine is total lost old tech from FXL (1983), Easy-Laser 1998-99, and PT probably before 1983 (and all the others trying out). They all miss geometrical references and require way to much time and re-do's compared with Hamars and PTs highend systems. These Crossfire systems can also NOT do a lot of advanced functions compared to Unidirectional 3-axis & 5-axis systems.
