TTT Ep10 – Lighting Tips For PDR

Good Lighting Gives You An Excellent View Of The Dents

Hi I'm Tom from Learn PDR Online and welcome to Tom's Top Tips.

In this episode, we're talking about Lighting.

It is key to have the correct light set up to successfully remove dents. 

Now been a PDR technician, you can be working outdoors with natural lighting or often inside a workshop or body shop for the trade account such as car dealerships, showrooms and such.

So having that light set up can be a bit of a task if you're working outside and you're using natural lighting, obviously if it's a sunny day you have to use that sun in the right position or set up your line board or reflector board to be able to utilize that to give you a nice clean reflection on the panel that you're working on.

If it's occasionally with the sunshine you get that glare, and we use umbrellas or gazebo pop up shelters to give us some shade to work in. Equally if you're working inside in a body shop or workshop environment and it's artificial lighting, then using that same reflective board, we can have floodlights strip light set up which mimic the lighting or at least give you a nice clean reflection against the board to really see what you're doing.

Also in a body shop environment or when you're working indoors, we don't always need to use the line reflector board or fog boards we can use strip lights themselves. So particularly we have vehicles that have multiple dents such as hail damaged vehicles, we can use multiple strip lights set up across the panels and the light itself gives us that reflection or show us a distorted line where the dent is.

A Correct Lighting Set Up Is 100% Worth It

So whether you're working outdoors or indoors with natural lighting, artificial lighting strip lights, it's very important to ensure you have the right lighting set up and that can sometimes take a little while setting up but is a 100 percent worth it.

You will also be working your dent from different angles. So it's important to be able to have those lights at the right angles behind you or in front of you to make sure you can really see what you're doing.

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