accuracy with drop weight machines

[alltora]

The need to get drop weight machines completely horizontal for accuracy is much exaggerated.
The force varies as the cos of the angle from the horizontal.
At 0 degrees 100%
At 5 degrees 99.6%
At 10 degrees 98.5%
At 15 degrees 96.7
At 20 degrees 94%

Hardly worth the trouble getting the thing completely level.

[GB1]

Hi.
I'm afraid it is rather more complicated than that.

In fact, provided that the pulling jaws are set at right angles to the dropweight bar, the loss in force arising from the variation of the dropweight bar from the horizontal is exactly reversed by the deviation of the jaws from the vertical. The greatest effect is the change in the angle of the string being tensioned, accentuated by differing thicknesses of string. The trigonometrical formula involved is huge! There is normally a change in the order of 12% between 20% below horizontal to 20% above. This can be greatly reduced by setting the angle of the pulling jaws away from a right angle to the dropweight bar, but I doubt if many manufacturers of stringing machines are aware of this!

Taxes.