Originally Posted by
BetterSense
Have you determined your error tolerance on your measurement? If you attempt to adjust anything based on measurements, without knowing what the tolerances on the measurement is, and on how tolerance there is in the actual quantity being measured, you are not doing justice to the measurement. This goes for anything not just enlarger alignment. The first thing you should do once you get the ability to quantify anything is to quantify the amount of error that is tolerable. If you don't, you just end up arbitrarily setting the tolerance equal to your human ability to read the instrument.
For example, you might be trying to get the laser aligned so well that you can't perceive any misalignment in the beam. But that's not 'perfect' either...it's just equal to your ability to perceive the error. I guarantee if you could 'zoom up' or use a finer laser beam, or shoot the beam across the room to get more angular resolution, you would see that when you can't perceive any misalignment, it's still misaligned to some extent. Where do you draw the line? It might well be that you only have to align the laser dot to within a 1cm radius of the laser aperture to achieve acceptable alignment.