I was not really talking about rigidity, but about the interference pattern you get. The wheels have a ball bearing inside, which is designed to take longitudinal forces, but you apply lateral forces. That’s why they will never run perfect.
Though I agree, in most cases this won’t be visible and even when it is, you can use other techniques to cover it (like scan angle setting), so it will be a rabbit hole if you want to make it perfect 
The pattern I was seeing was when the laser was engraving on the X axis (left/right), not the Y axis (front/back) when the lateral forces on the bearings would be the issue when making changes in that direction. There are two wheels on the top and two on the bottom of the laser head carriage. The original setup only had one on the bottom. I’ve run the same 20mm x 250mm block test in both directions, and the lines I was seeing before are no longer there.
I’m not doing anything professionally, only having fun making things for others, and no one has ever complained. If I decide to start making money, I’ll look into a whole new setup and likely go CO2. Until then, I’m just going to enjoy myself in retirement. The other part of this is that once the weather gets nice, we won’t be home much. We have a really nice camper, two sail boats, two kayaks, two bicycles, and three motorcycles, so the laser will be sitting mostly idle until late October. In short, I have a fixed amount of money to spend on hobbies, and because we have so many of them, each one only gets a small piece of the pie!
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