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Home Forums Equipment And Tools Two Questions about Alignment Equipment

  • smt

    Member
    December 10, 2015 at 3:35 pm

    Hunter Hawk Eye – been doing alignments for 35 years, best system i ever used. #10

  • Joseph Van syoc

    Member
    December 10, 2015 at 5:09 pm

    Tru-lign,TL-12 with one ton dually kit. I bought this because I am a small one man shop without a bay for an alignment rack, the system wasn’t terribly expensive and I can use it with wheel stands.  I would not recommend this system, has been one issue after another seems like, and I just don’t trust it to give me an accurate toe reading.  In a shop my size ROI also just isnt there, but there is no where close I can sublet an alignment out to that I would trust.

  • Alan Ollie

    Member
    December 10, 2015 at 11:58 pm
  • stevebfl

    Member
    December 11, 2015 at 10:11 am

    We bought a Hunter Hawkeye camera system a couple years ago. It was the third new system we had bought. The first was a hunter in 1980. The second was a FMC in 1995. We bought the FMC because at the time Hunter swore that they were dedicated to the upgradability of their 111 series through the end of the century. We/I wanted a PC based tool that I could network so that I could have Alldata and my shop management system on the same computer to save steps. After we bought it, not two months later Hunter hit the trade magazines with their PC based tool that “could run your whole shop”. Anyway, the FMC was by far the most accurate and repeatable of all the tools.

    I love the Hunter camera system since it reduces the work tremendously. It cut the time to do an alignment in half. But I have measured cars numerous times for various reasons and the repeatability just isn’t where the non camera system had it.

    We have 5 other techs that are using the Hunter regularly.  Three of them were not here when we had the FMC, the rest love the Hunter for the ease of set up. 

    The main reason we changed from the FMC (which was working just fine) was that two car manufacturers that we do a lot of work on  (BMW and Porsche) have stated that alignments to their cars can not be done after the car has been lifted until the car has driven at least a mile.  That meant that standard wheel run out calibration was not acceptable.  The camera systems just roll the car forward and backward which is acceptable.  

  • Greg Waite

    Member
    December 17, 2015 at 1:08 pm

    John Beam (on our second JB camera system)

    Rating: 7 1/2

    Purchase Date: 2011

    Pros: Accurate, Repeatable, Fast

    Cons: Software not as intuitive as you would think it should be, as to finding things like customer files, etc

              PC / hard drive crashed in 6/2015 (had to replace + updated to latest software) 

    We
    bought our first John Bean camera system in 2001.  Going to a
    camera / rollback system did reduce the work tremendously. It cut the
    time
    to do an alignment in half & more at times. All our techs use it
    whereas before only 1 or 2 did alignments. Have had no issue with
    repeatability.

    We have 5 Techs that use it regularly, about 1/2 said 8 the others 7. (I don’t know that any would give anything a 10)

  • Tom Piippo

    Member
    December 22, 2015 at 12:06 pm

    I have used various models of Hunter equipment over the years. I bought the Hawk Eye system 4 years ago and is by far the easiest and most robust of all the previous models. The car is set up and angles acquired in 10 minutes or less from the time it rolled on the rack. Now, making the adjustments…?

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