Best light for detecting swirls???

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Besides halogen lights. I'm sick of putting these lights in my car when they're boiling hot. Looking for a hand held light I can take with me when inspecting potential customer's paint. What do you think of the 3M Sun Gun?
 
unless you want to spend $250, the sungun in not cheap. i nice bright LED light will work, and they all very on how many lumens they are...
 
This is one of the rare instances where I'm tempted to post some kind of "do a search" type response as we've done pages and pages on the topic.



I still like my incandescents, especially on metallics.



But I do see stuff under the SunGun (in an otherwise dark room) that I can't see under any other conditions, including natural sunlight. Heh heh Mike Phillips has teased me a little about that level of inspection and I'm not saying he's wrong :chuckle:
 
David Fermani said:
Get the Sungun!!
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You know I really like mine, but for spotting "normal swirls" I think I still like incandescents the best :think:



Heh heh, the SunGun can make you aware of issues you don't always need to know about ;)
 
What about something like a Fenix CREE light? I have a PD20 that goes up to 180 lumins on full bright and is pretty darn bright. If you dare look into it, you WILL go blind. It was a little over $30 and there are much more powerful version above it if you want. They are tactical lights for being mounted on top of rifles and such (I don't honestly know as ive never even fired a gun).
 
David Fermani said:
I usually see alot of Body Shops having Sun Guns for spotting paint defects. Those suckers are bright.
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My "good" painter uses one, but more for checking the color/metallic match than anything else I think.

D_Nyholm said:
What about something like a Fenix CREE light?
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My good flashlights don't really do it for me in this application. Not what I consider handy while detailing for one thing. They work fine for general inspections though, and I do use my EDC (that's "EveryDay Carry") light to inspect potential used-vehicle purchases- shows marring pretty well.



But generally when detailing I like a hands-free approach when I'm not using the SunGun (and that's still unique in my experience, shows stuff like holograms like nothing else does for me). Having the light at a given distance from the paint seems to help achieve the desired "distant point-source illumination" effect that I find optimal for swirl-spotting and I can't always get that when I'm holding the light.



The preceding isn't intended as a :argue or anything, different lights work better/worse for different people.
 
Ahh, that is good to know! I might have to look into a sun gun in the future as I start adding some more jobs this spring.
 
D_Nyholm said:
Ahh, that is good to know! I might have to look into a sun gun in the future as I start adding some more jobs this spring.
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It took me a while to really appreciate the SunGun. For a while there, I thought I'd wasted a ton of money on it, but then it let me see stuff that I couldn't otherwise and I changed my opinion. But really...for the longest time I couldn't see stuff with it the way DaveKG said he could, and I was seriously :confused: about what was up with that. Guess it's just like a lotta stuff, you have to keep [messing] around with it until you get that "Eureka!" moment. Now it drives me nuts in a different way, has me stressing about stuff I didn't always notice before!
 
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