Level or looking level?

I once plastered a chimney breast which was as level as the spirit level bubble indicated,when you stood back and looked at each alcove wall the darn thing looked cockeyed had to build it up from floor to mid way up the chimney breast side walls.

the bubble dissapeared after this but it looked 100% better to the eye.

Most odd

Would be interesting to follow a course of bricks all the way around the house and see if it joins back to the same course. There's a brickie name for houses where this doesn't work, but for the life of me, I can't remember what it is.

Well the only reason to make it level is so it looks level, so in this case, go with the brickwork.

So it looks right. Don't think the Victorians had heard of spirit levels round here.

Just an optical protrusion? (groan)

Is it often not so much tool-less Victorians but dear old gravity and differential settlement?

|Hi All | |Fitted a plaque (with the house number on) to the outside porch wall. I |fitted it dead level as you do. | |SWIMBO complained that it wasn't level. When I checked, the plaque was |indeed spot on the bubble, but the brickwork isn't. | |Trouble is, the eye assumes the brickwork is level, so the plaque does look |off level. | |So, do you fix stuff so it IS level or so it LOOKS level?

So it looks level to SWIMBO. There is no technical reason why a *plaque* should be level.

I believe they say it "has a pig in it"

Alan

I rarely use a level, unless there is some overriding reason why what I am doing has to be level, such as aligning a bar feed to a lathe. Even then, I set it by eye first and only use the level to check later, as its quicker and I'm not likely to be out by more than a centimetre or two on 4 metres. For something put up purely for visual effect, like a house plaque, it would be done entirely by eye.

Colin Bignell

In the late 60's/early 70's, there was an explosion of building in Tidworth (garrison town in Hampshire/Wiltshire for them as don't know) as troops were being brought back from Germany. There's a small parade of shops built at that time where a large expanse of wall drops a course from one end of the row to the other in about 20 courses. Looks bloody awful, and still there as far as I know.

No, take it off and cement render the wall and paint it (mark the position of the holes first).

Then use the original holes to refix te Plaque (I am sure thats the dental spelling not the blue thing on the wall spelling).

The the plaque will be level, and SWMBO won't think it isn't, and you'll have saved yourself the trouble of drilling extra holes.

In message , The Medway Handyman writes

Always so that it looks right, unless there's some overriding reason that it must be true level.

True. And it comes in handy for finding the dog's ball.

I did the same mistake when I tiled the bathroom in my previous house, a perfectly level line around the room allowed me to tile all the walls and make the grouting lines actually meet :-) . Top and bottom row of tiles were cut nicely, measured up one by one before cutting.

Of course with the ceiling sloping ~2cm from the front to the back of the bathroom (~2.5m) and the height of the top tiles therefore being noticeably different the wife's first comment when she looked up was "you didn't manage to get that very straight did you!"

That was a brand new house BTW. Some> Hi All

Only one? Now that *is* a bad case of differential settlement.

Owain

That would be the plasterer not the bulider or even the carpenter.

======================= Maybe you're due for a new level. They don't last for ever.

Cic.

It's handy to have one which reads right one way...

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember snipped-for-privacy@cucumber.demon.co.uk (Andrew Gabriel) saying something like:

"On the piss."

The message from "The Medway Handyman" contains these words:

Depends on what it is. If it's purely visual, then go by appearance, if it's functionally relevant for it to be level - like a worktop or shelf, then level and damn the torpedoes.