[Watchmaking] EP.5 Painting a watch dial - UV Printing

Perhaps one of the easiest ways to create a watch dial is to 'print' it. Even on watches on the market, various printing techniques are used, such as silk screening and pad printing, which are often used to print logos or text on pre-painted dials.


UV printing is a relatively new type of printing method, in which UV ink is sprayed from a nozzle like an inkjet printer, while at the same time the ink is hardened by a UV curing lamp. It can be used to print on almost any type of surface, and is characterized by the durability of its results. Another great advantage is that most UV printers support white ink, although this may vary from printer to printer. There are many applications, such as buying a watch dial without a logo(sterile dials) and printing your own logo on it with a UV printer.

UV Flatbed Printer

With all of these advantages, I decided to try making dials with UV printing. The problem was getting a UV printer. UV printers are too expensive to buy, and they need to be installed in a well-ventilated area, so it was difficult to rent one. It would have been easy to simply design a design and have it printed by a professional UV printing shops, but I wanted to get my hands dirty with a UV printer, so I found a "maker space".


A "maker space" is a place with equipment, such as UV printers or 3D printers, where you can rent space and equipment for a fee. I found a makerspace nearby that had a UV printer, so I visited it and used the UV printer.


My original plan was to paint the prepared watch dial base with car spray paint, and then use the UV printer to print only the logo and indexes. However, I decided to change my plan and use the UV printer to print the base color first, and then add the logo and indexes. I also prepared the Illustrator files I had been working on by dividing them into two files: one for printing the base color, and one for the logo and indexes.


My plan was to
1. Place the paper on the printing bed and print outlines only.
2. Place the dial base according to the printed outlines.
3. Print base color on the watch dial base.
4. Print the logo and indexes.


Unfortunately, the UV printing didn't work out as well as I expected.

It wasn't a problem with the UV printing method, it was an environmental issue at the makerspace I visited. UV printing software, called RIP software, is so important in UV printing because it provides all controls on UV printers. The UV printer I rented had a low-quality, Chinese-made RIP software installed, which caused problems with my Illustrator files, including unrecognizable logos and broken indexes. My solution was to convert my Illustrator files to high-quality PDFs and print them.


The result was this.



The left dial has a glossy finish clear coat and the right dial has a semi-gloss finish clear coat. The finish I used is a 'Top Coat' spray from Mr. Hobby.


The quality wasn't that great as I expected. The black color was not dark enough, and it had thin stripe printer head marks. I think if I had asked to the professional UV printing shop, I would have gotten a better print and a higher quality.


Anyway, these are my first dials and I loved them. I finished the dials with putting lume on the dials with the metod I mentiond on EP2, and made the watch with it. (There are some interesting stories on this watch. It has quartz movement in automatic watch case! I will post about this someday).



Unfortunately, I don't have this watch anymore because, as I mentioned in the previous post, I ordered a 0.5mm dial from a site called laserboost and worked with it, but UV printing made the dial even thicker and caused problems with interference with the hour markers. If you look at the photo below, you can see that the interference caused scratches on the dial.


UV printing was very convenient, but I wasn't personally satisfied with it, so I decided to paint the watch dial color with paint, and use pad printing for logos and text.


Thanks for reading this post, and see you in the next post!


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