UV Light Recommendation

Just curious what sort of UV lights folks are using?

My son being a mechanic uses an ultra violet light to detect leaks in the coolant system in the fleet vehicles he services. He has a pretty good knowledge of what works and what doesn't. He turned me on (sorry for the pun) to a little UL flashlight, BOLDER, by ANKER, $23 on Amazon.

For those of you that are on a budget or, like me, who feel specialized stamp stuff is too expensive. This is a pretty good deal. It's small, easy to handle and short wave. Works on all the stamps I have and is good detecting grills, embossments...

Just sayin!

*** Moved by Staff to a more appropriate forum. ***

I agree that specialized stamp gear can get pretty pricey. Thanks for the link, I'll go check it out.

It depends on what you want to do with it.

Long-wave uv-light, normally, is useful for showing fluorescence.

To show phosphorescence, it depends on the country. A number of countries, foremostly the UK, used phosphors that react to irradiation with shortwave UV-light. That tends to be the expensive type of lamp. In many of those cases, a long-wave UV-lamp will be of little or no use at all. This would be the case for most UK phosphors applied up to the mid-1990s. At best the long-wave uv-lamp will show some phosphorescence. It, however, is not good enough to identify the type of phosphor. Often, it will not be helpful at all. The same goes for some other countries.

Looking at Lighthouse's US site, the L80 longwave lamp costs USD 24.95.

My bad. It is a long wave UV light, 380nm wavelength.

Moyock, as we stated in an earlier post you need a short wave light. The best and most dependable ones are the AC lights. The portable units are fine for exhibits but to go into the stuff they are not satisfactory


Peter

I have multiple UV lamps - short and long range. The shortrange model performance is dictated by the quality of the notch filter that tunes defines the wavelength (how much side leakage renains).

My favorite is a Lighthouse brand. My second favorite is a Raytech Versalume dual wave but no longer made.

I also have a 11W rock light (https://www.ultraviolet-tools.com/) which works even in normal light compared to the 4W battery models but the bulb life is short (on / off cycles).

There are lots of threads about UV Lamps here in the Supplies forum.
Use search above.