Calling Richard... for LED solution details

Richard, cool to see. Please elaborate in the parts that you put together for your setup. That may help others as well.

 

Richard,
This looks like a great all-around solution for portable, easy to set up and maneuver lighting.

Can you please share the details of this, as in materials, where to purchase, stand, etc.,,,

Thank you for all the hard work you have put into this ! It looks great and operates at a really nice level of power.
Dan F

 

The light fixture is an LED light that you can find from a number of sources online. It's known as a security LED lamp and they run in watts from 10 to 100 watts. The light they put out is blinding, you literally need a welders mask to look at them..as bright as metal halide but at much lower operating watts. Unfortunately, they don't come ready to use out of the box, so I wired mine with a 3 prong power cord and power switch and they also don't come ready to mount on anything, so I mounted a standard light stand mount. I tried a number of LED lights and while the higher wattage produce more power, they are very heavy and become difficult to move around, not to mention top heavy when using on a stand.

So what you see here is an old Bogen/Manfrotto light stand on wheels. This model was sold as a portable solution..the large caster arms fold up when not in use. I also attached a Bogen C-Stand arm to the light stand so I could put the light out over my work surface.

I am working on bringing this lighting solution into the States if anyone is interested. Phil should be one of my first retailers to get the setup and pricing is not finalized but should be in the range of $100-$125 ready to plugin.

One of the benefits of using a standard light stand mount is that you can source some very inexpensive stands from $5-$20 at camera stores that will hold the light exactly where you want it. I have a variety of them and will post things you can do with it.

If you guys can wait a few months, I expect to have them available by SEMA.

Richard

 

What I saw @ the Meg's get - together looked pretty cool to me, make it..................and I/they will buy(lol).

 

Richard,
Thanks so much for the quick detailed reply on the light and stand.

I would be so happy to buy 2 each of the product when its ready to sell.

Appreciate your hard work and innovation here !
Dan F

 

Was very cool seeing this light firsthand at the NXT class with Kevin Brown and Jason Rose. Even outside in the light, the LED showed a substantial amount of defects even in the harsh outdoor light.

Count me in for this....maybe a couple of them.

 

I'd buy one or two. It looks like it works great

 

Here are some images of the paint lit up with this light.

Midnight Black (Metallic) MINI Cooper door panel using a $10 floor light stand.


Same car showing some tests with a finish polish to remove haze from a MF Cutting pad..though the paint looked great under the halogens, the white LED lighting clearly showed the paint was still hazy.


Random Isolated Defects are clearly shown here as well.


Jet Black MINI lit up with light showing 50/50--LED's excel in revealing micromarring and haze in the paint.


The hood (bonnet) under the sunlight even shows less flaws in the paint


Compare this Audi Q5 lit up with a typical 500 watt halogen


Versus our LED that is 55 watts--cool to the touch! Subtle difference in the photos, but clearly visible in person. The LED just shows more than what the standard hot lights show especially when it comes to hazing and holograms.

 

these 2 stand out the most, maybe b/c the LED is so much brighter (whitish/blueish)

the LED has a way of highlighting the defects more than the halogen.

nice work Richard. looking forward to it.

 

Thanks for sharing Richard. I'm glad this thread was revived!

 

No problem! Thanks for letting me know! I've spent a great deal of time and money exploring this technology since I last posted. I'm glad there is still interest in this topic!

 

Wow Richard, those 2 pics of the Q5 is a great example of what it can show. I am in for 1 or 2 myself!

 

Badass!!
Richard did you experiment with any other lumen level of LED? I had been looking at a similar, outdoor flood LED that I was going to affix to a stand, but it puts out 2000 lumens. Do you think 6000 is the way to go?

 

Now don't post again until you can sell us some units :giggle:

 

2000 lumens won't be as useful. What I've learned is that we want the most lumens to a point with the largest spot as possible. Lower lumens can be helpful if you plan to put it right against the paint but then you lose the ability to see holograms and other hazing. But they will clearly show swirls. The light needs to be further back so that it can illuminate a larger surface. My early LED's ranged from 750 to 2500 lumens and they did not perform nearly as well as this unit.

Last year I was thinking that individual CREE's were the way to go as I learned that tightly spaced LED's actually made swirls less visible. The spacing made all the difference. But these multielement LEDs are so close together they actually act as one large LED and that actually benefits us.

However the higher the lumen, the heavier and bulkier the unit. So there is a balance.

Richard

 

Would this light work if I'm a mobile detailer that has to work under a canopy.

 

Yes! We have used this to evaluate paint that was in the bright sunlight and the light was used to light up the doors during the evaluation. I'll try to get some pix of what it looks like under brighter lighting conditions.

 

I want this. Take my money

 

Would love to see as well.

 

I have two pix in my gallery that show this...this was a 2500HD that we performed our evaluation outside of the shop. They aren't the best pix but atleast they show that we could correct the paint outdoors.


Performing the evaluation with our Rupes LHR75

Each spot looks pretty good until we check it with our LED light


Confirming the test with a Fenix hand held light. This was a simple evaluation comparing major and minor paint correction versus our Enhancement detail. The owner originally thought the Enhancement detail was enough until we shined our LED light and he felt the next step up, Minor Paint Correction was good enough for him.