DIY Laser levelling using webcam and laser level

[devmonkey]

Continuing the mission of bringing my frame into plane I have welded on some flat stock to mill down to plane. Rather surprisingly I picked this up at the local Wickes, about twice what it costs when you buy it by the full length but available within 10mins, they had quite a selection of small flats and angles. Welds were ground down so as not to foul the jig.



I have also made the jig. It is very crude but I think will work well and is very solid once clamped to the frame. It consists to a piece of milled aluminium plate with a window cut in it for the router, and two pieces of angle iron that are clamped to the 80mm box section of the frame. Three M5 levelling bolts thread up through the angle iron and the plate sits on these, these form 3 adjustment points to bring the top of the plate into plane with the laser. Then 3 M6 locking bolts pass down through the plate into threaded holes in the angle iron clamp down the plate hard onto the tops of levelling bolts. The levelling works perfectly and is very quick.

The plate has a recess milled into it to clear the flat stock, the idea is to set the router height to the thickness of the plate, level the jig, mill off the flat stock, unclamp the jig and move along, repeat.



So that was all very cool and it looks like it will work, however now for the irritating part which will require some thinking. The frame is sat on my supposedly sturdy bench. Unfortunately a wooden bench will not cut it for this operation. With the sensor on top of the frame and the frame clamped hard directly over the 4x4" leg I can compress the leg about 0.1mm by pushing own as hard as I can on top. This is too much and means I need something much firmer to put the frame on before continuing.

You see you can find out all sorts of pointless things with this laser system, I now know that about 50kg on the end of 2 bits of 2x4 about 1m long will compress them 0.1mm, how useful ;-)

It maybe that now is the time to build the solid table that machine will sit on then use that to do the levelling on, or bolt the frame directly to the concrete floor even.