I recently moved the darkroom and am having trouble aligning mine. I still have my owner's manual, which really doesn't cover this, though there is apparently something written out there that is much more detailed. I found a couple pages of that on another forum. My manual came with mine in about 1991. I have ordered a reprint of the more involved manual, and I have emailed Beseler and am waiting to hear back.

We didn't drop it or anything in the move, but what is now "off" is the chassis itself relative to the column. The big flat side plates that go front to back on both sides and hold the smaller negative carrier stage, are tweaked or canted relative to the vertical column. The plates aren't bent, but the entire moving chassis is a rotated a little counter-clockwise. If you measure up from the baseboard with a T Square, to the base of the side plates, they are about 2 mm off and you can visually compare the side plate spacing to the column top and bottom and see that it is off. What this means is that at the start of alignment with a Versaligne device, the glass reflection from the bottom of the universal negative carrier up top is way off to the side. And there is no way that I can see to bring it close to alignment unless I start putting shims under the large square casting, which shouldn't be necessary. The negative holder (lower) stage can be aligned, as can the lens stage. Of course if I fix this issue with the chassis those two will have to be redone.

I think the laser aligner probably gives us a degree of "perfection" which is probably not of practical benefit if the enlarging lens is stopped down 2 or 3 stops, but I'd like to get it closer than I seem to be able to. The answer is NOT to adjust the plastic thumb screws, 2 on each side. Those are to keep it from moving left and right as it goes up and down and they are designed to NOT touch the column when properly adjusted. So they shouldn't be a solution to this alignment issue.

Thanks for any help.