how does a leveling laser make a line

I think they are using coherent light from the laser through a mask.

--
Regards ......... Rheilly Phoull

A line can be produced with a simple cylindrical lens like a glass rod.

But they probably use a holographic optical element, like the kind found in laser pointers with 27 pattern heads. These are just very simple being either a line or cross. Search for HOE - holographic optical element.

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Not quite a mask but probably a holographic optical element.

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I have a cheap Harbor Freight line beam. It looks like a refraction grid that makes the line. looks like IIIIIIIIII to make a horizontal beam.

greg

is

in the

But what produces the verticality/horizontality ? The only one I was familiar with 20 or so years ago was a pro bit of kit using a gyroscopic spinner to obtain the a level plane of rotation, took about 30 seconds to achieve the level.

-- Diverse Devices, Southampton, England electronic hints and repair briefs , schematics/manuals list on

Yep, that's another way, so perhaps that could be called a mask. That's probably even cheaper than the HOE, but quite effective.

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You can't use two rod lenses as that will just smear out the line produced by the first. But the holographic optical element can essentially be made to produce any kind of image, so that's one way of doing it. They could generate two lines and then combine them but that's excessively complex.

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Sam Goldwasser spake thus:

So no rotating mirrors? That would have been my guess. But maybe too complex and prone to breakage for so simple a tool.

--
I hope that in a few years it [Wikipedia] will be so bloated that it
will simply disintegrate, because I can't stand the thought that this
thing might someday actually be used as a serious reference source.
Because in its current form, it's not to be taken seriously at all.

- Horst Prillinger (see
http://homepage.univie.ac.at/horst.prillinger/blog/archives/2004/06/000623.html)

Some professional leveling lasers do use an upward pointing laser with a rotating 45 degree mirror above it to produce a line 360 degrees around all vertical surfaces.

But the cheap bubble level replacements don't. :)

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