lighting question...

[Envious Eric]

so is there any way to check for holograms without the sun? What if you are polising in a garage, its raining outside, or super cloudy and you cant use the sunlight to check, what do you use? I have a feeling that I might have some slight hologramming on softer paints with a rotary and sometimes I cant take it out in the sun, so I finish down with PC instead of rotary...

[eyezack87]

I use a combo of halogens and LED spot lamps to see holograms. Usually the LEDs will give me some indication of holograms on the paint. Its been working well for me so far...

[Envious Eric]

the led i am using is a 12 bulb LED, didnt find too many holograms, at least not as bad as they were...this was on a black BMW after 105 and a white pad to remove some terrible marring and oxidation and hazy paint...

[Accumulator]

IME you simply need the sun for faint holograms, and the sun has to be at the right angle too. I had some *VERY* light ones on the DenaliXL that took two people, working at just the right time of day, to spot...drove me nuts.



Regular ones show up readily in sunlight but not under artificial light IME.



Nastier ones can sorta be seen with the 3M SunGun, you get a "hey, maybe..." sort of view that warns you an area needs some work. I bought the SunGun after Dave KG posted how he uses it to spot holograms, but it doesn`t seem to work for me as well as it does for him. Could be that we`re looking at differing levels of holograms or that his younger eyes simply see stuff better than mine do :nixweiss Better than nothing but instead of using it I just assume they`re there and do whatever I would if I knew for sure (namely finish out with non-rotary methods).



REALLY nasty ones sometimes show up under incandescents, but even *I* work the rotary well enough to avoid anything that awful

[eyezack87]

I`m using a 4 LED model by Energizer as well as this bad boy. Seems to work well enough for me :nixweiss



DealExtreme: $26.46 128 LEDs Flashlight Grey

[Accumulator]

I`m envious of you guys who can see holograms under LEDs



I have some pretty potent LEDs in some of our tactical flashlights, and they just don`t work for this for me I`ll try Accumulatorette`s new Tomahawk light for it sometime, maybe that one`ll show `em.

[Holden_C04]

If I can`t inspect for holograms in the sun, I will finish out with the D/A. In my opinion, there`s not many other options. I`d rather not risk anything.

[Accumulator]

Holden_C04- Yeah, ditto here. But I can`t help thinking that I never woulda gotten the DenaliXL just right had I not been able to do all those in-sun inspections. It was sorta amazing how hard I had to hit it to get those seemingly light holograms out; I never woulda gotten that aggressive had I just been doing my usual "I bet it`s hologrammed so I`ll give it a quick D/A-polish". That *was* an unusual situation, but it sure made an impression on me!

[MichaelM]

The Brinkman Dual Xenon does a decent job of at least alerting you to potential trouble spots. When fully charged you can at least see *some* of the lighter/est holograming.



One option I would like to try but haven`t yet is to use a Maglite with a Xenon bulb. That bulb is an optional item and should work well considering how strong a normal Maglite is.