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Vent: Thought I could eyeball a rail alignment and wasted a whole afternoon
Last Tuesday I got a little too confident on a modernisation job downtown and decided I didn't need the laser tool to line up the guide rails on the 4th floor. Figured I've been doing this long enough, I can just sight it down the shaft right? Wrong lol. Got everything bolted in, ran the car up, and it sounded like a garbage disposal full of rocks. Had to unbolt half the brackets and redo it with the laser anyway. Took me damn near 4 hours to fix what should've been a 30 minute setup. Learned my lesson hard - lasers are cheap, my time is not. Anybody else ever skip a tool thinking you got it and immediately regret it?
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the_lisa4h ago
Lasers are cheap, my time is not" pretty much sums it up for me too. I used to think the old-timers who swore by lasers were just being fussy, figured my eyes were good enough. Then I had a job where I missed a bracket by maybe a quarter inch and the car was grinding for weeks before I finally broke down and checked it. Never again. Now I set up the laser even for short flights, saves me the headache of redoing everything twice.
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avery6294h ago
Oh man, I feel that quarter-inch pain. Had a similar thing happen with a suspension job, thought I had it lined up perfect by eye, and the whole rear end was off by a hair. Wasted a whole Saturday pulling it apart and redoing it. Now I run the laser before I even touch the wrenches, especially on stuff with tight tolerances like control arms. Honestly, the time you save on just one screw-up pays for the laser ten times over.
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