Monocle

Complete with protective lens pouch, 3″ Pump sucker and Loc-Line positioning arm

Monocle makes visually locating, re-positioning and working your tool tip incredibly easy, even on modern hard metals and sharp bodylines.

If you can’t see it, you can’t repair it, with the Monocle, you can see the slightest movement in a reflection and the finest detail incredibly clearly, meaning you can stop mistakes before they happen and make every push, perfect.

Quite simply, Use a Monocle – Make better repairs faster.

See Description below for more detail.

Warning, Fire Risk! Do not leave your Monocle unattended if not covered with the protective pouch when the sun could reach it, especially in the back of a car!

Background:

We aim to produce tools and accessories that help you make better repairs faster and this is perhaps our best yet. With that in mind, you can't repair what you can't see and if you can't see where your tools is how can you know what best to do with it? Our initial brief was to find a way to see more in a reflection than you can with the naked eye, the 'Monocle' is the culmination of 3 years research, development and refinement, where we tried and tested countless combinations of designs until we found the perfect balance of weight, cost, power and durability. The final finished product, the 'Monocle' is way more effective than we had hoped, having also a few uses that we hadn't even considered when we decided to develop it!

How to use it on a basic dent:

Place the 3" pump sucker on the panel, just off centre of a line between your eyes and the dent, then adjust the angle and position of the lens on the Loc-Line so you can see the area you want to work clearly. Monocle is very forgiving, adjustable to any user and fully adjustable to the strength of any eye, which means the lens may be best placed, specific to any individual anywhere from 6" to 18" away from the dent and perhaps somewhere in the middle third of the distance between you and the dent. This may sound complicated, it's not. A few jobs in and you will be placing it at the perfect location on every job, first time, just like you can do with your favourite hook tool. Once you think it's in position, start to work the dent with the tool from behind, looking at the work area through the lens but pay particular attention to what you would ordinarily not be able to see! Monocle amplifies the slightest movement in the reflection, so be a little more gentle with the tool than normal at first, until you get used to it, speed will come with practice and you will be able to spot movements much smaller than normal in the reflection. The benefit of this is that you can spot the positioning of your tool on the dent and be better placed to control the position and power applied to it at a much earlier stage than ever before and most importantly, before you make permanent changes to the panel, thus reducing the number of erroneous pushes and the resultant tapping down and correction. The presses you do make are more accurate in position and in power. You make cleaner pushes, which makes for cleaner work.

While some of our real world tester technicians have been using this on almost every dent they repair (due to it making them faster as they take less time tidying up errors), it really comes into its own when you are working on a bodyline or fold in the metal. At this point, metal is very tight and it is really easy to put high spots in the metal while trying to pin point the location of where you are about to press. If those high spots are not exactly where you intended, or the height you intended, they become a problem and need tapping down (not forgetting the carnage that can be caused by over pushing on metallic paints!). The Monocle allows you to see your tool tip at a much earlier stage, almost being able to see where your tool is BEFORE you move the metal enough to change it's shape and more importantly, before you put that high spot in the wrong place, thus saving you time AND allowing you to make a cleaner repair.

Another really useful trick we've discovered is almost like "bending" light, useful when you get a dent that is a fair distance from your eye, perhaps at the opposite end of a quarter panel to your access point for example, or at the back side of a large bonnet. Dents like that can be more difficult to repair because you have less positional control over your tool, due to the length of steel between your hand and the tip, your angle of vision may be fine for the final touches, but is often too shallow to start the dent. Also, the further away the dent is from your eye, the less detail you can see. Apart from the obvious benefit of showing you more detail in your line of sight, the Monocle can be positioned so that it actually deflects the light a little. Only a few degrees, but often enough to make a huge improvement on the ease of making a successful repair. Just set it up so you look through the lens close to the outer edge, the light will bend as it enters the lens and again as it leaves heading for your eye, resulting in you being able to see deeper into a dent than you could otherwise do.

For those techs who wear glasses, or perhaps are occasionally wearing glasses, or even considering the need to get a pair of glasses, this will really help you out. Wearing glasses all the time will not stop you using a Monocle and getting its full benefit, but for those of you that perhaps only wear glasses for PDR, you may find that you no longer need to wear them. The strength this gives to your vision is ground breaking. You will see things you didn't know were there!

Challenge: Do a decent repair without it, then use this and take another look at your repair. Is it as good as you thought it was? That doesn't mean that you will be forever chasing tiny highs and lows that you can't see with the naked eye, it just shows you how much you are missing by not using a Monocle. When you can see something, you can repair it. If you can see it very well, you can repair it faster and cleaner.

Being able to see as well as possible and getting the most accurate information you can about your work is the key to a successful repair, the Monocle give you your best shot. Try it, you will not be disappointed!

The Monocle weighs around 890g (2lb) fully boxed and packaged up, it features a 3" Pump sucker, genuine Loc-Line segmented adjustable arm and the lens protector and support ring is available in around 10 different colours to match your corporate colour scheme.