[Watchmaking] EP.11 Adding color to the watch lume

The last time I made a watch dial with UV printing(link), I wasn't happy with the lume.
When I designed the watch dial, I wanted the watch hour index to be white, but it wasn't as white as I had hoped.


There are many different colors of lume powders on the market. The brightest and longest lasting are green (like C3), followed by blue (like BGW9). The lume power glowing blue looks white in sunlight. Of course, I also used the powder that glows blue , but it didn't look as white as I wanted it to when I actually applied.
Perhaps if I had applied the lume over a white base, it would have looked white, but the method I used was to fill the holes with lume paste, so it didn't look that white. (for more information, please see previous post)

After some thought, I decided to mix in some white lacquer paint when I mixed the lume powder with the binder. I thought that the non-transparent lacquer paint would make the lume less bright than the transparent binder alone, so I tried different ratios to see how much difference it made.




Here's a picture of the watch lume after fully charging it with a UV light, and 5 minutes after turning it off. To the naked eye, the lume without white paint was the brighest, but there wasn't much difference between it and the with white paint ones. Perhaps the white color didn't affect the lume performance that much. If I had used a darker paint color that absorbed more light, the lume performance would have been worse I think.

I mixed the lume paste with the proper amount of white paint and applied the lume to the watch dial. The result was clean white, just as I wanted!!



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