Using a Laser Pointer and 3D Printing to Align Electrical Conduit
As part of my ongoing garage renovation I installed new LED light fixtures on the ceiling. This required me to rebuild the existing network of surface-mounted conduits and brought to light some disturbing discoveries about the state of the electrical system in the garage I've lived next to, in blissful ignorance, since 2019. For more on that, watch the video above and learn how NOT to wire a garage with an extra circuit.
In addition to the downright hazardous faults I'm referring to was a class of problems that rise to the level of the merely annoying. One of those: the ceiling box that the lights depend on was rotated by a small but immediately apparent angle from the walls of the building. If, as planned, I installed the linear LED lamps using conduits connected to the box, the pattern of lights would not be perpendicular to anything else, which I obviously could not accept.
I wanted to measure how far from square the existing installation was, so I designed and 3D-printed an adapter that would allow me to mount a laser pointer concentric with a conduit coupler; that would show me where any conduits that I installed would end up pointing. I detailed this solution in a short video that made a minor controversy on YouTube and other platforms. Many commentators told me it was a waste of time (probably true) and that it couldn't possibly work (definitely false, although I admit that some luck was involved). But many others told me they had been looking for something just like it and that I might have a product on my hands.
So, in accordance with long-standing personal tradition, allow me that give that product away. Here is an STL file of the conduit adapter seen in the videos:
From the file name you can see that this is minor revision number 5, and that's because getting it to accept this particular toy laser just tightly enough took a bit of adjusting, as did the rotate-to-switch-on feature. One of my followers asked for this, and I hope it works for him and for anyone else that cares to try it. The laser I used is very cheap, a supermarket checkout-line sort of item, and it has been a ubiquitous design for at least a decade, so your chances of finding a compatible one are pretty good.
2025
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