Lost 3 days redoing trim because I trusted a level I dropped

Dropped my 4ft level on a job in Tulsa last Monday and didn't think twice, but every baseboard came out crooked by a quarter inch. Rechecked with a new one and felt like an idiot for not testing it before I nailed 40 feet of casing. Anyone else got a tool failure story that cost them a weekend?

3 comments

3 Comments

calebw5018d ago

Why not just mark the bent level with a sharpie and use it for rough stuff, like @sandra14's crooked doorframe trick?

andrewt4120d ago

Nah, I'm gonna play devil's advocate here. A dropped level isn't the tool's fault, it's the operator's job to verify it's still square before trusting it, especially after a hard hit. Blaming the level for your own skipped check is like blaming your tape measure because you didn't read it right, lol.

sandra1418d ago

Funny enough, @andrewt41, that whole "verify it's still square" thing reminds me of the time I watched a buddy check his level against a door frame after dropping it, and the frame turned out to be crooked. So he spent ten minutes recalibrating his own eyes before realizing the wall was the liar here. Guess my point is, trusting your tools is one thing, but sometimes the world around you is the one doing the tricking.