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Showerthought: I bought a $500 digital inclinometer for a tricky job in an old building.

It was for setting up a new hydraulic elevator in a 1920s bank in St. Louis where nothing was plumb. The old ways with a bubble level and shims would have taken me two extra days. This tool paid for itself on that one job by getting the rails dead on. What's the most you've spent on a single tool that actually saved your skin?
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2 Comments
river_fox18
Man, that's a smart buy. My buddy in concrete swears by his laser level for foundation work on sloped lots. He said the old string-line method was a nightmare for getting things square. That thing probably saved his crew a full day of rework last month.
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calebwilliams
Yeah I was reading about this contractor who had to do a retaining wall on a really steep backyard. He said before lasers, they'd be out there with strings and levels all day, and stuff would still be off by like half an inch. With the laser, they got the whole base set in one afternoon. It's crazy how much time gets wasted on double-checking old methods.
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