Terri no doubt has an elegant solution involving packing foam, but have you called Helmer? Their tech support is very good. I'm not aware that the scribes can be adjusted but you never know...Short of that, you could replace the scribe, readjust it every morning (you're probably looking at it daily anyway), or learn to live with it. An hour is not much of a space on that little disc; I'm happy if my techs just get the right day of the week and AM or PM. The purpose, beyond satisfying AABB and CAP, is redundancy to your alarm system to see if your blood got cooked while no one was looking, and to see if an unfamiliar tracing might indicate a potential problem down the road. The batteries, by the way, are only for backup with a power loss and shouldn't have anything to do with normal operation.