I am interested in purchasing a set of Benchmark Gauges from Acculign. They aren't being promoted by the manufacturer because Mark Essinger's interest is focused on Motorcycle Accessory manufacturing. He still makes the equipment on a small scale word of mouth type sale. His father, Jack, who passed away, was the inventor/promoter of this technology.
Any opinions? Anybody use these?
http://www.acculign.com/
Thanks,
Jon

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Jon McFadden,

Jon,

We have a set that I used on some fairly large turbine driven feed pumps. I spent close to a year tracking machine movement. The measurements took this long because the machine was not out of service much and I wanted to get 2 or 3 sets of consistant data. The readings came out fairly repeatable. Seven years later we hired a contractor to come in and measure the machine using lasers and optical. The original readings that I took matched his to within a few thousandths.

I feel ike the Acculign is a good system for the right price.

Mike C.

We have several sets in the refinery and have used them successfully for many years on our tough alignment jobs. Ours are the older style with mecanical dials. I developed an excel spreadsheet for doing the growth calculations and sent it to Mark Essinger a couple of years ago. I don't know what he decided to do with the spreadsheet.

Hudson
I sent an e-mail to Mark to find out if he still had the spreadsheet.
CSI's UltraSpec has a Thermal Growth program that uses the Essinger Rods for data.

Here's Mark's response:
Jon,
I do not have a spread sheet for doing growth calculations, but I do
offer software and worksheets for thermal growth calculations that are
used in conjunction with my tool sets. I offer these for free, and
you can download them from my website. Let me know if you have
anymore questions.
Thanks,
Mark Essinger
http://www.acculign.com
************************************************



MikeC
Thanks for the information, too.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Jon McFadden,

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Jon McFadden:

Here's Mark's response:
Jon,
I do not have a spread sheet for doing growth calculations

Thanks,
Mark Essinger
http://www.acculign.com
************************************************

Jon,

Maybe Mark is more interested in the Motorcycle Parts business! I use the spreadsheet because I like the ability to change values and see the results, to enter only the values that have changed, to save the data to disk, and to be able to print the results out. The software that I have from Essinger gives the same results with the same inputs, but doesn't have all the functions listed above. I did the spreadsheet as a challenge to figure out the math behind the system as well as having a tool to use! I emailed it to Mark quite some time ago, but I guess he wasn't interested.

Hudson,
There is no question about his main interest. I had a chat with him before I posted this question. I wanted to know if it was a system that I could use without support in case something happened to Mark.
I would be interested in a copy of your spreadsheet if you still have it.
Thanks for the information.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Jon McFadden,

Do you specify acculign for purchase of rotating equipment? Is there any alternative to it?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Josh,

Alignment article by Jack, the inventor of Acculign:
http://www.acculign.com/acculign%20pdf/article1.pdf

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Josh,

Look like a variety of actors contributes to misalignment.

2 questions to those who have fitted and used acculign before for hot alignment:
1) Do you need to shutdown the machine?
2) Do you need to breakdown the coupling?