I have had a couple of challenges recently where I have aligned my piece to the spoils board, but using the laser it was not aligned. Another situation where I squared to the laser but not to the spoils board. In both instances the cut was not squared to the piece. Clearly the laser was not aligned to the spoils board (the laser is easily moved when bumped). Anybody have any guiding principles or advice on how to make sure the piece is square to the cutting portion of the CNC?
What’s important is getting it square to the movement of the cutting head. I align one corner to the crossing point of the beams and use the laser lines to get it roughly aligned. Then I move the head along one edge making sure the laser follows the edge so the laser cross point is at another corner. Iterate as needed.
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I have a pencil holder I turned down to fit jn a 3/8 collet. When I don’t have a lot of extra material I will create a bounding box path and use it like any other tool. Sometimes the lead breaks or doesn’t show up well, but since it’s right on top of the material you can still tell if you are square enough.
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In typical fashion, both ideas are genius. The issue with getting it square was around the horizontal lines on my piece. Turning the laser on and running it down the parallel horizontal lines will work great. Thank you.
I use a slight variation on this: I turn on the laser and apply short 3" strips of blue painter’s tape to the spoil board. I mark on each piece tape with pencil the exact crosshair of the laser when it’s at each end of the short strip of tape. (Of course, the strips are oriented along the axis, i.e. the laser’s travel path.) This gets repeated for 2 or 3 such strips in either dimension. Don’t forget to set home and don’t screw up home. 
Then I just square up the workpiece to the tape, and try to remember to clean up. 
The “pencil holder in collet” is pretty creative. 
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