Beam Alignment

[Jason Lippert]

This may fall under the "Captain Obvious" department but maybe not. After reading a recent post I decided to check my beam alignment since it had been a while. Right off the bat the upper left was off quite a bit. The bottom two quadrants were not that bad. So as I braced myself to start that lovely process of realignment, I shut the hood and to my surprise my beam was almost perfect in the home position. So I checked the other corners and everything was OK. I opened just the glass and nothing changed. So I open the whole hood and the alignment on top goes way off from the weight of the cover! So I'm not sure if this just applies to my make and model, but be warned, if you make those adjustments with the whole cover open you are going to be WAAAY off. (Epilog Legend 36EXT)

[Barb Macdonald]

Thanks for that post, Jason! I have the same machine. That makes a lot of sense......
neurons are firing!!
And it's only Tuesday
Barb

[Roy Brewer]

...I shut the hood and to my surprise my beam was almost perfect in the home position. So I checked the other corners and everything was OK. I opened just the glass and nothing changed...

Jason,
Would you describe your flooring and whether or not you're using your jacks to keep the wheels off the floor?
I did have one client properly using the jacks but that had a wooden floor that tended to "give" a bit when he opened the large door. This was not obvious, but could be detected by putting the level on critical parts of the chassis when opening the door. A steel plate beneath the system was recommended, but rather than mess with that, they just decided to always laser with the door closed (for goodness sake!!!).

[Frank Corker]

Wow! That sounds pretty ridiculous to me. That has to be a design fault if everyone gets the same problem.

[Jason Lippert]

Jason,
Would you describe your flooring and whether or not you're using your jacks to keep the wheels off the floor?

Well let's just say that the laser is not on ideal flooring. Our building is old. I do use the front two jacks. The rear ones are not reachable when the laser is in position. While this may contribute to the problem I really believe it to be flex in the back of the machine. I would like any other Legend owners to try this. Put your alignment target in, open the door and see if the pointer moves off position. It may be just this model, who knows. Either way it only really is a factor when aligning the beam.