[Watchmaking] EP.13 Making a full lume dial - Planning

 I previously posted about dials made with UV printing. (link)



The dial on the right is the one that I made the watch with, and you can see the circular scratch in the center. This is where the dial touched the hour hand.

There were two problems with the dials I made at the time

- The metal dial base was 0.5mm thick, and I didn't thin it down.

- It was bent instead of flat (ordered from laserboost, see previous post).


Moreover, the watch was powered by the quartz movement which made the watch constantly run, and one day I took it out of the watch box and there was the scratch like this.

So I decided to make a new dial.


At the time, I was a little tired from all the trial and error with the yellow diver watch. I wanted to do it in an easier way this time.


One easy way to print a dial is to use a decal. (see previous post) Think of it as applying a clear sticker, but decals are much thinner and have tighter fit than stickers.


So far, I've been using a custom laser-cut metal dial base for making dials.


I realized that it would be difficult to apply the decals because there are holes on all hour indexes. So I decided to buy a blank dial and apply decal on it.


However, if I made the dial in this way, there was no lume on dial. Of course, there are watches without lume, but I wanted to have strong lume on my dial.

I had an idea: since the decal is transparent except for the print, I thought that if I applied lume to the blank dial and then applied the decal, it would be a full lume dial!!!



But how do you apply lume to the entire dial?

I had a lot of ideas and actually tried them out. I'm going to share my trials and errors.


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