How to use a Rotary Laser (sponsored by Dewalt)

so when you look at this great behind me it looks like it's got a nice taper running away from the house but actually it's the reverse I'd literally just snap these lines so we get it and so we've broken let's try to get this thing actually set up and running there we go I always figured that the vault made good tools I just never realized how tough they make you tour today as much as it hurts me to do we're gonna see me push some of these tools as far as I possibly can [Music] alright guys we got a lot of ground to cover today and I don't want to waste any time because we are going to be talking about rotary lasers how to set a grade how to set a footing and exactly what all this equipment actually is by the time you're done with this video you should be able to bring a brand new employee in set him down and if he watches this whole video he should be able to go out to your job site and be fairly comfortable and familiar with the names of all the tools plus speed the basic concepts of how to use a rotary laser out on your job site let's start transiting rotary lasering and doing whatever the hell it is I talked about what the basic components of a rotary laser are and let's start with the actual rotary laser that's this unit right here this is not to be confused with a transit now a transit looks a little bit like the sight on a rifle and it's actually used the same way but a transit requires two people a rotary laser on the other hand requires one man mono e mono now I'm also use it used to always use a Topcon laser and recently well not recently about ten years ago whoa whoa whoa top con is a red shirt or top con is a trademark of kabushiki kaisha top con corporation which has not endorsed approved or sponsored this video but Dewalt has nice yeah it looks really clear alright so what I'm actually talking about you guys is this was dEWALT's idea this video to bring you guys the basic fundamentals of how to run a rotary laser was brought to you in part by Dewalt so there you go big thanks goes out to them for helping put this video together switched over to Dewalt lasers and there's a reason and we'll cover that later on but I want you to get basically familiar with what this is this is a rotary laser is actually the receiver this is the grade rod the receiver slips nicely on to the grade rod and allows you to determine where your grade is at that's it this guy's is you tripod so when you're out on a jobsite if your Foreman says hey go grab the tripod don't bring them this don't bring them this bring them this they say they need the receiver here you go grade rod here you go and they may call this a transit but it's not it takes you a rotary laser one way or another you'll know that this is not any of those other ones so now that you're familiar with the basics of what we're going to be using in the names of the tools let's actually start to use them so let's say you're out in the real world on a jobsite now I'm in my living room for a reason because it's seven degrees outside and it's flipping cold it's easier for me to explain this stuff when I'm not freezing like let's say you're out in the job site in the real world and your son job supervisor says hey we need to set up the laser this rotary laser remember Stan rotary laser it's not that hard to say the very first thing you need to do is get this thing as absolutely flat as you possibly can that may not always be possible I'm not going to be able to duplicate some of this conditions you get outside in the ground but I am going to do the best I can let's say you've got really uneven terrain these legs are adjustable they allow they allow you to get the laser or the tripod see even I'm screwing up as level as possible by adjusting one of the legs down you can then go over the top of obstacles the most important thing you need to remember what initially set up your tripod let's try to get it as stable as possible and out of the way also when you initially set up the tripod where the rotary laser is going to go don't put it behind where people park their cars the rotary laser depends on shooting a laser out and allowing the receiver to interact with that laser it literally is shooting out a laser beam 360 degrees you have any obstructions between this and the receiver the rotary laser isn't going to work the ground you put the tripod on is actually pretty critical if you have soft ground and this thing moves or adjusts it's not just going to throw your numbers off but if it gets too far out of whack it's gonna throw the whole thing off and what happens then is you have to start all over again but you can't just go out pick it up set it back up and keep reading numbers because that'll throw all of your calculations off once you set up the rotary laser you then have to establish a benchmark you have to mark down with that benchmark is and then you can do the rest of your calculations from there let's try to get this thing actually set up and running if this does not have to be perfect for this Dewalt laser now if you're using a top-line or another laser system that could be that actually has a big impact on what you're trying to do and sorry my bird talks because I talk so you can hear her in the background once we get this fairly close we actually can hook it into the tripod get it secured don't just set it up there and leave it now I am slightly off balance here you guys can probably see that so I'm gonna do the best I can to try to eyeball this to get it right some rotary lasers are gonna have individual adjustments and then a bubble that you have to actually have to get it all lined up if that's the case well those are just extra steps and that's also why I like to go with these like to go these because they're drop resistant so once we get this what I feel is setup I turn it on and then I let it be for a minute because right now it's calibrating itself and then it'll start to spin on the inside now we've got the rotary laser is spinning that is the rotary laser establishing its own balance right now you've got to give it a minute to do that we're actually going to talk about what all of that means right now let's pull the top con apart once real quick so the top con will when you power it up they will self level and see I don't even think it will power up right now so they're pretty cold Soto's so all of these will self level to a certain extent so when you set it up you've got to get the laser the rotary laser close and then from that point it'll take it over for you but we don't have in this one we don't have rechargeable batteries anymore so that means when the batteries go dad I'm run into the store the reason I switch to the DeWalt Sam can you grab this camera for me real quick the reason I sweated great honour the reason I switched to the DeWalt is because I can pop the battery out and this is just something you know you guys use your common sense it can pop the battery out and I also know exactly where my battery life is because we've got an indicator on here also with these babies versus like the top con check this out top cons flashing fabulous battery's dead okay it's also telling me that it's out of level until and this this laser right here is about two G now I've I've probably bought at least a dozen of these over the last 15 years or so and they get dropped they get lost in two thousand bucks when you drop it or lose it kind of sucks these these costs a fraction of what that cost this gives me two thousand two hundred feet of laser that I can read more distance than my top Cano gave me and this will do everything that my top con will do so why would I spend almost four times the amount on a laser when I can spend less and pop this battery out and use it in my drill if I have to not trying to sell you these lasers but if you guys are in the market for one this is where I migrated all of my choices to and it just makes sense so let's actually show you guys how to read great and check this out guys Sam Josh show me fingers a little cold today a little bit it's like seven degrees up feels like seven degrees all right use my 3ds in the gloves all right let's set up the laser and then we'll show them how to read to read a footing you got your laser you don't know what your elevation is you set it up and it won't start well it's not going to start like this like you literally just gotta get this thing somewhat close eyeball it and then come in a little tight we hit the Go button right here and this laser will automatically level but if you're too far out of spec it won't know Sam can you see this part right in here because what we're doing what it's doing right now is it's attempting to level itself I may have it too far out of spec I literally just slapped it down and this is trying to figure it stride a correct for the crap that I just did we'll see if it well there it goes so now that means that this thing take a look at let's look at it from the top down lunch I want to show these guys you see how far out how far over the dad is that's kind of an indicator of how far away we are from it but now let's talk about we got the laser setup rotary laser dude not laser rotary laser we know we're operating but we've got to dig how far down did we dig with this one Tim toy feet we dug 20 feet deep that's that's what Tim Cove is way too so do you have a benchmark set up no sir alright so what we're gonna do actually we've got a bottom of footing right here a typical construction site can go guys we're gonna use the top of the first block now in this case I'm just doing using this as a demonstration of how to read numbers but what I'm doing is I got my transit set on the top of our very first block laser we have to go over this rotary laser not laser rotary laser I'm gonna find where she beeps she's gonna be right about here and what you see me doing is looking directly do that just don't if you care about your vision let's see you got your green goggles up yes if you do that look directly under your rotary laser just use your green googles all right so we are right now at three foot five and a half on our on our stick now we want to go we want to get the bottom of our footing down 12 inches below that so the numbers will actually go up we're going lower so as you go lower the stick goes down your numbers go up so let's go over here the bottom of this block should 12 inches lower and where's that chisel four-foot I'm sorry thank you so we're right there we've got a we've got our setback down six inches here and we want to go six inches deeper so that puts us one foot below where our benchmark is on this wall we're going to be using the top of that block to set the rest of these block that way as we dig the trench we know exactly where we've got a gull and we'll just take it and run it all the way down so as you go deeper in the trench the numbers will go higher on the stick that's what you need to remember so here's something fun guys when we talk about challenging job sites Tim called me up in a panic Thursday of last week right Tim right but you I love your personation I mean hey you said the owner of the plumbing company came out yep that's pretty cool the owner came out got down in the hall started working and showed me everything you need to do to do this right this is let me know if you got any questions otherwise it's a pretty hefty bill for his company to come out and do it and and so he literally just came out hold on what's up okay I told you what to do dude that is HUGE when I'm using that guy forever can't anything I need any kind of services WAP calling a gap ever need to be a dude that is awesome a little goes a long way you know what I mean so what did he tell you to do it's all based on the curvature of the earth we'll get in deep here okay so tip Jim doesn't want to tell you what the owner of the company told him to do you know why Tim doesn't want to tell you there's a piece of poop yeah the reason Tim doesn't want to tell you what he told you to do is because on Thursday he called me in a panic oh we snapped the sewer line and blah blah blah and I'm like Tim go get to Fern COEs one to cut the pipe with our concrete saw put a furnco on each end and then put a new splice to the pipe in but that wasn't good enough for Tim he had to think about it within the next day he called me up said it's way more complicated than that I'm just gonna let you go over there now I'm gonna say nothing but really Tim more complicated you just want to do things legal okay so what is the correct fix that we're going to do to get anything to do did the owner say to use to fern codes and a new pipe just wondering just wondering captain snark it is what it is sometimes guys you don't have to overthink it but you do got to do things the right way I respect him for wanting to do things the right way did it did it really make you feel better when that guy came out and told you to do the exact same thing I told you to do yeah it kind of did because he's a licensed plumber and knows knows what you know the right proper way to even though you were right make my head I get big big you got a little I'm already on YouTube and I know I gotta have that much attention so everybody please look at me it's been two days and you haven't looked at me in a video please watch me some more all right well I'm off to another challenging job site I literally just snapped the bone and cable line running from the house up to the barn not now most of you guys probably normally get half Demark utilities before you start excavating but here's something that some of you may not know is the utility companies will only mark the lines that they is installed any private lines will not get marked that means that a line running from a house to a barn a garage or a shop installed by a homeowner or a different contractor won't be marked that's why these got hit here's another thing these are still hot even though it's a phone in a cable line if I touch these ends it'll wake me up all right so we're at the next jobsite all right so we're going to talk about digging footings now I'll plane you've already got this one set what I want to relate with these guys is how you establish the elevation because we've got almost an 18 inch deep trench in this [Music] well because the soil out here was a little on the soft side we talked of engineer and he said to go at least 12 to 8 feet inches the base underneath the first block usually we only go six inches to this good solid ground but in this case we went 18 it was really soft and we're down to about a foot a base under this look is the first block so no we want to go about a foot in front my footing behind okay so when we're actually setting up if you want to come in a little bit tighter what Blaine is doing right now is he's got enough dug out so that he can put his rock down in place and he's actually not using a real grade rod because you don't always need to have a grade rod when you're actually once you get your elevation set you can set the elevation on the stick and then you can just use the stick this gets a little bit more advanced because now you're really not reading numbers as much as you are understanding where the grade needs to be is that right that's correct so here's where Blaine's first block is but here's where he wants his elevation set is right here and if we flip it around he come in you can actually hear he's got this dead-on and instead of using a transit in this case he's actually just setting it up so he's got a mobile he's literally as he's building he's just going to be using the rotary laser down the line to continued establish so he knows that his rock is always going to be right here if you can look that means you got a at eight by any chance that's I figured he would have a tape he's got tape right there so if you look here's where his rock is gonna be and it also means that he's got almost a foot yeah it's actually a foot right on the dot he's going down the line he's gonna be transferring that all the way down now I got a question for you you've been using this Dewalt laser for all summer long did you know it actually has something called tool connect it's actually called tool connect technology and that's a trademark of Dewalt and yes they made me say that I don't know why they just did I don't really get it but whatever okay do you know what to connect is most connected to us well what it does you wouldn't know and actually we wouldn't use it much on our job sites but when we get onto our massive projects where we're maybe putting in a retaining wall over here and then one all the way across the lake you can literally set the laser up across the lake it will shoot that far and then if you ever lose the laser it will actually track your laser while you're out on a job site it will actually tell you where your laser is so I happen it's an app it's an app but it's an app for guys that use it on massive projects or if they're using it some you know they can also use these lasers inside on houses and things like that and it'll tell them exactly where it is so that the laser doesn't walk off the rotary this is technically a rotary laser so the rotary leader does laser doesn't walk off on one of their job sites now question there's more than one way to skin a cat and there's more than one opinion on any subject and so I wanted to find out from Blaine if he liked the DeWalt laser or the top Condor just because I like it doesn't mean he's going to like it and I want to find out from him what he feels about it good bad or in between and the reason I'm beating this dead horse is because I am a little bit salty at top con because when I was starting out I remember spending thousands of dollars on lasers that I didn't have I just didn't have it and there was nobody else out there providing an alternative method and so when this these Dewalt lasers finally came out it was like ah I really was a I really honestly appreciated the fact that I wasn't spending so much money on just a rotary laser and so that's why I'm covering this subject in so much detail now let's also look at how we actually read a grade out on a jobsite this is gonna be the next thing that we need to cover because if we're ideally setting grade for a patio something else we want one inch of drop per every eight feet of run meaning that every eight feet we go out the great should drop one inch no we're not setting this up for a patio but I just want to kind of walk you through how we read a grade like that so this is going to be our high point at this point we get our initial grade set again we're gonna be at three foot six here and as we go down we want the grade to go down if we want the water to flow that way the numbers should go up so as we move out over here our numbers should be bigger and Todd you were standing right thank you so whatever number this should be sometimes it takes a little bit to find the number so we're at three foot seven so that tells me that from this point to this point we've got one inch of drop and as we continue as long as we want the water to shed away we should maintain that one in two drop for every eight feet of run in fact I'm going to guess that almost eight feet dead on yeah actually we technically are eight feet so this is our eight foot mark right all right guys well I hope this video has helped you out and a big thanks goes out to Dewalt because they actually came up with the idea for this video and said hey what do you think about doing something like this and I have honestly used a Walt rotary lasers for a really long time according to the DeWalt people I'm supposed to tell you that they sent me the laser to use in this video even though I've bought and Todd I can't tell you how many of their lasers I've already bought already had they sent me the one that I used in this video because I guess it's the latest and greatest thing so I…