Laser Level

One aspect of finishing my basement crawl space was getting the floor level. For this application, it certainly doesn't need to be exact, but it would be nice to be close, and one might as well try to do it right in the first place. I needed to do some measurements early on in the process so the correct spot to cut the contrete walls could be determined. A laser level is ideal for this as it allows one to project a level line across 20+ feet from which I marked the walls. I did all of this back in 2002, but now that the project is nearing the end in 2005, I pulled the laser level outa strorage and fired it up to see how well I did. The hardest part is getting the level itself *exactly* level,

The picture below was my first shot - not a real good one because it was shot with some daylight streaming in from behind me, and with the concrete chunks in the front (plus the back wall curves in), the perspective of the laser is skewed - it's a whole lot more level than this picture suggests. I'll see if I can't wander on down to the basement crawl space to shoot some better pictures in the next few days.

OK - I shot some more pictures from the 4 different directions and tried to get the camera right behind the laser level to minimize the distortion due to perspective. In addition to the issues above, the light/shadows make the lines appear to be not to straight ... but in actual fact, it looks like I'm less than one inch off of level - not too shabby! ;-)

First off-angle picture

Laser Level shooting to the North

Alek gets zapped by the Laser Level shooting to the West

Laser Level shooting to the South - incoming water pipe in foreground

Laser Level shooting to the East

Close up of Alek's hand getting lit up

Closeup of crosseye on support beam on West shot