The Hamer L-742 Laser Roll Alignment System has proven itself worldwide as a highly accurate and easy to use tool for precision roll alignment in the papermaking, recycling and printing industries.
Alignment errors in most roll-type machines, whether a film line or a paper machine, will produce a product that has wrinkles and other quality problems. Material wander to one side of the roll or the other results in down time and potentially tons of scrapped product. Often the only alignment methods available are using optics or trial and error with tram bars, both of which are time-consuming, subjective and costly.
The L-742 Laser Roll Alignment System, by contrast, is so accurate and easy to use that you can get the alignment right the first time, saving enormous costs in reduced downtime, scrapped product and quality problems. In fact, many machines are able to run at faster speeds after laser alignment. In some cases, this increased productivity will pay for the laser in a matter months.
At the heart of the system is the L-742 Laser Transmitter which projects two extremely flat vertical planes of laser light produced by continuously rotating lasers that are very accurately square to each other and able to reach targets a distance of 60 metres apart. A laser plane accuracy of 0.0013mm/m effectively allows rolls that are 60m apart to be aligned within 0.075mm of each other.
The L-742 Laser Transmitter Unit is small, light (1.3kg) and self contained. It is also equipped with precision 1 arc sec levels and both coarse and fine pitch, roll and yaw adjustments for setup purposes.
The system is completed with multiple wireless radio targets each with a 25mm measuring length and 0.0025mm resolution, and a hand-held PDA operator readout station loaded with specialised graphical alignment software.
In practice, the L-742 significantly simplifies roll alignment. It is so easy to use it usually only requires one operator. Built-in software features specifically designed for roll alignment assist the operator’s task, eliminating manual calculations and providing live measurement data exactly as it is needed to make the correct adjustments.
The system’s range allows rolls at multiple elevations to be easily checked for horizontal parallelism in one setup of the laser at a convenient mounting height, even working simultaneously on multiple rolls. It also allows many sections of a papermaking or printing line to be checked without shifting reference targets.
The accuracy of the Hamar system turns the roll alignment process from an art using optics into a science using lasers. Guesswork is essentially eliminated because the target electronics determine the digital alignment reading, providing high repeatability from one operator to the next.
The patented Hamar principle of perpendicular continuously rotating laser planes also provides a far easier to use system than other point-and-shoot lasers that have been found by the industry to be difficult to set up, slower and more labour intensive.
An example of the power of Hamar's Laser's alignment systems is the alignment of a Mark IV printing press using the L-742 system. In this case it took one technician 3 days to align the whole press which was then spun up and immediately went to rated speed with no further adjustments. The consultant for the customer said he had never seen anything like that in 30 years of installing printing presses.
Whether it is to be used for realigning a single roll or setting up a complete paper mill or printing line, the unique capabilities of the Hamar Laser Roll Alignment system provide time savings and accuracy improvements compared to traditional techniques or competing laser systems.
It is a very affordable yet powerful tool to not only measure but also to fix roll misalignment in almost any kind of paper mill or process mill, in a fraction of the time needed with conventional methods.