The $300 laser level that almost ended my career on Tuesday

I picked up one of those fancy self-leveling lasers to speed up a long garden wall job in Austin. Worked like a dream for the first hour, then the battery died and it defaulted to some factory calibration that threw every course off by half an inch. My foreman caught it before we set the coping, but I spent two hours pulling brick and redoing mortar. Anyone else had a tool that made things worse when it malfunctioned, or is it just me?

2 comments

2 Comments

finley_gonzalez491mo ago

Half inch off is worth catching though. Most self leveling lasers store their last calibration, not a factory one, when the battery dies. Sounds like yours either had a bad firmware update or the battery went out mid leveling and it locked in a shifted position. Those digital levels are great until they decide to lie to you. Glad your foreman caught it before the coping went down.

jason_lewis31mo ago

Lie to you" is the scariest phrase in construction.