Storing and Retrieving Historical Balance Jobs

The information provided is for help with Commtest Instruments products:

vbSeries® instruments

QUESTION

How many balance jobs can I store in the vb instrument? What can I do if I need to store more?

ANSWER

The vb instrument has the capacity to store 10 balance jobs total. This is independent of the amount of other data stored in the instrument, as the balance jobs are stored in a different part of memory. Each balance job contains the Date and Time of the job, the Machine RPMs, the Initial reading, the Trial reading(s), and up to 10 Balance/Trim readings. If more than 10 trims are performed, the last one is overwritten (and you should suspect other problems, perhaps resonance - see article: Imbalance will not Reduce).

Each time you save a balance job to a machine, any previous job on that machine is overwritten. i.e. the instrument can only store one job per machine. If you attempt to store an 11th balance job, the instrument beeps at you and displays a warning message (since version 2.20). You must delete an existing balance job to make room for your new one.

If you need to store more jobs, you can send them into the Ascent/MAS VB software and store any number of them there. You can keep an entire history of balance jobs for each machine as well. They can be printed directly from Ascent/MAS VB, or sent to Word for formatting. The balance jobs cannot be sent back into the vb instrument, but you can quickly re-enter them manually. Here is how you do it

From the Main Menu press [8] to access the Balancing Menu and press SHIFT+RESET to erase the previous trim readings in memory, then press SHIFT+RESET again to erase the previous initial reading (this only affects the current memory, not the saved jobs).
Press [1] Set Balancing Parameters and check that settings are appropriate then set the Rotor Speed (in Advanced Balance Options).
Access the Trial Readings menu and press [6] for the initial readings. A highlighted 1 and 2 will appear.
Press [1] to enter the amplitude then [2] to enter the phase. Press ENTER when you have finished.
Repeat the above process for the trial reading by pressing [7] (and also 8 for dual plane balances). Press ENTER when you have finished.
From the Balancing Menu select [3] Balance. Now press [2] to manually enter the first trim reading. Repeat for subsequent trims if any.
At any stage you can go out to the Balancing Menu (press MENU) and press [4] to review the balance job - the initial, trial and last trim readings.

You are now ready to use or save this balance job. If you set up the sensors and machine speed exactly the same as the original balance, you can go straight to trim balance instead of needing to re-perform the initial and trial readings.

FAQ ID: 11614 Last Reviewed: 15 October 2002