I'm a newbie at plastering and many thanks to those who have posted tips on on how to put up Gyproc.
I've found that if you use a cheapo halogen lamp, at Bunnies, and shine it at the joins at an oblique angle you get a good idea of where the lumps and depressions are.
It seems to work for me.
Hope this helps.

I used a similar idea but with one of those miners head lamps.

It will also drive you mad if you are trying to get a perfect job!!

Glancing light is always going to show up imperfections in plasterboard joins. It is a lot harder to do a plastering job under lights as it is in normal light. Mainly because you see everything!! what you would normaly find acceptable until sanded can look terrible under lights. Causing you to go over work to often.

Having said that it is not a bad idea for a newbie to find bad spots. Not a good idea to keep a tradie honest!! He might smash your light!!

I had a guy once going around with a light like that asking me to patch the milling marks on the board. He acused me of not "sifting" the plaster before mixing becuse he could see these very fine scratches under lights.
The scratches were left by 150 grit sand paper!!

So be careful using lights with plastering.

A good way of getting a great job is to lightly sand down the under coat any high or low spots will show up and can be repaired with top coat.

Also over filled joins can be detected by using a level to gently run over the suface after the undercoat. Any high spots will show up as a black mark from the metal on the level. Now you know exaclty where to fix.

We used this method to repair a block of units where the plasterer had overfilled every join. We sweeped over the wals and ceilings with the level and the joins stood out like a road in the snow. We were able to fill out boths sides away from the high spots with topcoat. The result was a flat finish.

Cheers

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Many thanks Rod.
It's good when a bloke spends some time to help another bloke.
Your help has been great.

Tony