slay

Haven't been here in a while and come back reading this - it breaks my heart The way this community formed ˜20 years ago with such continuity among members, GTGs and so on, I don't think such a thing exists or forms on todays internet. Rest in Peace Bob.

@Mike on a bike I'm having the same issue - my Platinum Membership expired and the only thing I could purchase was VIP (but after that my inbox is still at 136%). Can you help me with this so I don't have to delete everything? Thanks a million!

I'm in. Questions: Are you able to cut/polish the chamfers on the lugs fat and crisp? What's the timeline and approximate price? But please please please make a good quality crown, which doesn't wear out so quickly

Since I know there are a lot of big Rolex 6538 Big Crown fans among you, I wanted to share some pictures of the 6538 GILT Hands that I've been working on for almost 3 years now. They come with Big Lollipop Seconds and are for sale in two different Lume Colors and for three different Movements. Most important information first, followed by a few paragraphs for those interested in the details Perfect / Gen-Spec for Rolex 6538 / 6538A Big Crown. Will also work for a few other references and are better than anything else available for the following references: 5508, 6536, 6536/1, Gilt 5512 & 5513, 6200 (partially) (high-res pics at the end of the post!) Lume Colors: LEFT: Eggshell (Tritium-like, light beige) RIGHT: Old Radium Light (light Yellow-ish) Movements: Rolex Cal. 1030 / 1035 / 1570 / 1520 etc. ETA 2846 / 2836 / 2824 (and a few others) Asian 2813 (aka Asian 21J) Price (including shipping): (15% discount for each additional handset within the same order). Rolex Cal. 1030: 85$ ETA 2846: 50$ Asian 2813: 30$ Only available while supplies last. There won't be a re-run once a certain movement size or color is sold out. Please note: that I will probably never recoup my investment on these, because the market for these hands is quite limited and the tooling & setup cost were astronomical. I would be insulting your intelligence if I told you that the unit production costs (or marginal cost) are higher for 1030 hands vs. 2813 hands - but in order to make it fair for everyone, I'm charging more for the Rolex 1030 hands, because whoever can put down 4-5k on a Franken, can justify 85$ on a perfect set of Gilt Hands, but for those of you on a budget who are using a super cheap 2813, every $ counts. Even at 85$, the Cal. 1030 hands are cheaper than hands from Michael Young or Phong, which are nowhere near as accurate as these. How to Order: Please send me a Private Message with the following info: Quantity, Movement and Color Your Shipping Address (need to know the country before I can send you PayPal instructions!) Vintagizing Service: For those interested in Vintagizing service (some pics below showing the oxidation), I might consider a limited run of Vintagized Hands. These will be 100$ more expensive for each handset and I will do them in batches. This is not a 24hour service, don't message me about this if you are generally impatient. It's a very time consuming process that requires full attention throughout the entire process, involves several different toxic/dangerous chemicals, safety gear, patience and an experience that is acquired by damaging a lot of handsets in the learning process. Even with practice, there is still a big risk for me of damaging the hands that I'm vintagizing, which means I have to start from scratch with a new handset. If you are interested in this service, please send me a PM and let me know! Details of the design process I went through to make real 6538 Hands: Almost every Gilt 6538 you can find on the internet has hands that look different, so it was extremely difficult to get a real original sample to work off. It was hard enough to even determine which hands are truly "original" 6538 hands and which are actually hands made for other watches like the 6536, 6536/1 or 5508 and either carelessly used by Rolex or mounted by some watchmaker later on. After 100s of hours of research over the years, I was confident that I found the real original 6538 hands on a handful of different watches, which provided me with sufficiently good resolutions and angles to reverse-engineer the hands dimensions with the help of a few mathematical approximations down to the 100th of a millimeter. Very complex process, because no photo was shot 100% perpendicular to the dial surface and there is always some perspective distortion and at 0.01mm even a small change in perspective will affect measurements. I have numerous reasons for my confidence and if you have the time to bear with me for a bit, you will know how much thought and effort I put into designing these hands 1) every part of the watches I used appeared to be original and untouched: - the red triangle bezel inserts on the watches I used as samples were in incredibly pristine condition, while showing all of the characteristics of genuine inserts from that era (if the hands had been replaced, surely the bezel insert would have been too; additionally, nobody would “waste” these pristine red triangle bezel insert on a watch that was cobbled together) - the chamfers/bevels on the case appeared to be the unpolished original chamfers - the bracelets had the same clasp code as the caseback (e.g. 1956) 2) The Dials are early "radium" dials - early dials had the lume plot @6 made of radium (and the other lume plots tritium): - Radium glows brighter than tritium; so having one bright(er) lume plot (and knowing that it was @6 o'clock) allowed them to tell the time quickly because they didn't have to guesstimate where top and bottom of the dial was located while diving in the dark. Due to the level of radiation emitted by radium/zinc-sulfide luminous material, many of these dials were changed over the years. Changed dial also likely involves a change of radium hands. So finding a 6538 with radium dial is also a good indication that the hands are also still the same as they were when the watch was originally assembled. 3) The Minute Hand on all my examples perfectly hit the chapter ring: - If you research 6538 pictures on the Web, you will see that the length of the minute hand is all over the place, depending on which example you look at. From a designers perspective, it would make sense that Rolex would pick the length of the minute hand so that the tip of the hand either hits the chapter ring itself, or at least hits the end of the tick-mark of the chapter ring. Many other early big-crowns (e.g. 6200) have hands that hit the chapter ring, I concluded that it should be the same for the 6538. 4) Big Lollipop Seconds Hand: - Early 6538s came with both Gilt and White Big Lollipop Seconds hand. They taper off towards the and the tip hits the outside of the chapter ring. Plain Gilt Second Hands come without the curvature at the edges of the added white enamel coat, so there is more contrast/definition between the hand and the background. This made it easier to get more data for my calculations. So in combination, all these signs of evidence are making me extremely confident that this is how unaltered, original 6538 Gilt hands should look like and that my measurements are pretty much identical to Genuine & Actual 6538 Hands. So what makes 6538 hands unique compared to other handsets? Minute Hand: - The Sidewalls of the Minute Hand are very thin (significantly thinner) than on other gilt hands, resulting in a wider lume area. Most other aftermarket Handsets use the same sidewall width on the hour and minute hand - which is wrong. - Tip of the Minute Hand should hit the chapter ring. Hour Hand: - The Mercedes Star has very thin lines, thinner than the mercedes star of later 5512/5513 hands - The sidewalls of the small "inner" triangle on top of the mercedes star should be thinner than the sidewalls at the base of the hour hand (most aftermarket hands use the same width for the inside of the Mercedes star and all side-walls - e.g. Michael Young) - The sidewalls of the small triangle should also taper off as they run towards the round mercedes star and not be the same width. The result of tapered triangle side-walls is that the small "inside" triangle looks more like an Equilateral triangle, while the outside triangle is much taller and looks more like an Isosceles triangle Seconds Hand: - The diameter of all 3 circles or "balls" on the seconds hand are proportional to each other. Each circle is almost exactly 3/4 in diameter than the next bigger circle, i.e. the medium circle around the tube is 3/4 of the diameter of the Big Lollipop Circle at the tip of the hand, while the small circle at the end of the Seconds hand is 3/4 of the medium circle (or 1/2 of the Big Lollipop). - The tip of the Seconds hands tapers off above the big Lollipop circle. A big issue with watch hands is that you have to work with such tight tolerances, that there will always be a difference between the CAD drawing and the mass-produced product. So the CAD design has to compensate for the "deviations" of the machine that's being used to cut the hands. Molding Costs for watch hands are very expensive (up to 1200$ for each one of the 3 hands!) and each time you make a change, you have to buy a new mold... so experimenting is definitely not cheap ;) Because the hands are so small, 0.01mm difference can alter the look significantly under a loupe (or at full screen in AutoCAD), depending on where width is being added or subtracted on the hand. The only small detail that I’m still a bit bummed over is that no watch hands manufacturer whatsoever was able or willing to produce the minute hand with the slight chamfer around the base (where the hole is). The chamfer is also present on non-rolex hands from the same era - I have many vintage handsets with chamfer in my collection, from various different swiss hands manufacturers (most of them don’t exist anymore). Let me know what you think! Pictures below show the handset with the two different Lume Color Options under two different light sources. Stock hands on the left, compared to oxidized hands: ...and finally a few pics of my custom 6538 hands, which I Vintagized by hand: Before you call out the base: I realize that the base around the hole on the hour hand is slightly larger in diameter as on Gen hands; the reason is that the base must be large enough for ETA-Sized holes (which are bigger than Cal. 1030 holes). This slightly bigger base diameter is not visible when assembled! The Lume Plot of the Hour hand is still the correct length! Old Gen Hour Hand superimposed over mine illustrates this: @dbane883 @Kime @Bart Cordell @Nanuq @rolojack

I just tried to edit one of my sales post and while editing it I had all sorts of random pics that aren't mine attached to the post, see screenshot below. Could be a potentially serious privacy/access permission issue? @Admin @Nanuq

Here's an even fatter Insert:

Possibly because your particular Gen Insert was printed later with more worn out printing pads, which would result in bigger numbers. No two Gen Fat Font inserts you can find today will look exactly the same - they share characteristics such as Serifs and the overall Font, but they vary greatly in terms of how "fat" the font is. This is true for other inserts as well, e.g. I have a Gen Long-5 insert, which some have called the "fattest long 5 they've seen"

Slightly faded insert on one of my recent 1665 DRSD builds:

FYI you don't really need to use a drill press to enlargen the hole if your Yuki Pearl doesn't fit! You can use a round Diamond Needle-File / Hand-File - aluminum is very soft and will probably take at most a gentle quarter-turn back and forth by hand. Just turn the needle file a bit inside the hole and check every quarter or half turn if your Pearl fits. Always good to have a set of these inexpensive Diamond Files for a variety of minor watch repairs: https://www.amazon.com/Premium-Grade-Diamond-Needle-Stone-Protian/dp/B0048087RQ

It should be obvious to any vintage Rolex lover that the stock bezel inserts on all Cartel Vintage Rolex watches are outright hideous. I was also never happy with any of the alternatives offered by Phong, Yuki & the rest - their fonts are inaccurate, they are lacking serifs, and both numbers and tick-marks are way too perfect and too straight for a Vintage Rolex Insert. I think many of you have heard about the saying "If you want something done right, do it yourself". So that's what I did! I have a particular fondness to Fat Font and "Kissing 40" Inserts and the bezel insert was that important to me - anyone who ever went from a bad to a good insert will know how much the bezel insert changes the face of the watch. It took me over a year with many revisions and a lot of trial and error to make a bezel insert that is (in my opinion) the closest thing to a real Fat Font insert on the market. Background: To give you a bit of context on what makes Fat Font inserts unique and special: You may have read about "Fat Font" and "Kissing 40" and even "Kissing 50" Bezel Inserts and Genuine Inserts with those features often come with a $2k+ price tag. The reason why such inserts are both rare and so sought after has something to do with how they were produced and when they were produced. The printing pads used by Rolex to make bezel inserts wore out over time and this wear and tear resulted in numbers that started to be less and less perfect. Numbers and tick-marks started to bleed out on the edges and into each other, resulting in features such as the "Kissing 40". Today such imperfect inserts would be discarded, but back in the days, Rolex did not care much for perfection and consistency, which meant that bezel insert produced close to end-of-life of these printing pads made their way onto watches. In making these MK1 "Kissing 40" Fat Font Bezel Inserts, my main goals were: Production technique: Mimic the worn-out printing pads that were used to add the non-conductive paint for the numbers on the insert before they were anodized. "Fat Font" and Kissing 40 were a result of wear and tear of those printing pads I made custom molds for both the aluminium bezel itself & for the Font of the numbers / tick-marks. Font & Serifs: Used a Genuine MK1 Font and kept fine details, such as Serifs, as accurately as possible Including for example "odd" serifs on the base of the number 2 No two big or small tick-marks are exactly the same and they are not perfectly rectangular either - each one of them was custom-drawn. Size & Fit: These have the same inside/outside diameter and the same back-side profile as Genuine MK1 inserts. Outside Diameter: ~36.55mm, Inside Diameter: ~30.3mm They should snap-in to both Rep and Genuine Bezel Rings and don't have to be glued The inserts have a thinner outer edge compared to most Replica/Cartel inserts, which means no more sanding necessary for the insert to sit properly (i.e. slightly recessed) in the bezel ring Color: A color mixture was used during the anodization process that will fade to blue when exposed to oxidizing agents or bleach (and not red or purple). You can also make them tropical brown instead of faded-blue if you like. As you can imagine, this wasn't easy: it took me over year of going through numerous sampling cycles and re-designs in order to get the result I wanted. Not to mention that I drove my manufacturing partner nearly insane and they would have stopped working with me if I hadn't visited them in-person twice and showered them with gifts I primarily made these for myself, but to give something back to the community and in order to recoup some of my investment, I'll be selling a few inserts to those of you who are big Vintage Rolex lovers like me. How to Order: Please send me a Private Message so I can keep track of things Include the quantity and your shipping address. Payment by PayPal Gift preferred Price: 60$ shipped from Europe to anywhere in the world via registered airmail (10% discount on each additional insert) FAQ: Do you offer these inserts Faded or Aged? No - individual tastes with regards to how aged or how faded vary significantly and unfortunately I don't have the time to do this for every insert. However, there are many modders on the forum who offer this service. Do the inserts come with an Acrylic Pearl at 12? No - the inserts come without acrylic pearl. I had too many issues trying fabricating the pearls and since Athaya and Yuki sell them for 5-10$ anyway, I shelved that project for the time being. You could also re-use the bezel pearl from an old Cartel Insert (the 1680 on the pics below re-uses the Pearl from a Cartel insert). Many genuine inserts will also have lost the top part of the acrylic pearl by now, so you could also glue some yellow paste into the hole with epoxy in order to mimic a broken-off pearl Will you make any other Designs (MK2, MK3, Long-5, GMT)? Perhaps at some point in the future - I've done some of the design work already, but whether or not I will produce them depends largely on how many inserts of this production run i'm going to sell. Will they fit a Cartel 5512/5513/1680/1665? Yes. They should also fit in MQ/Phong/Vietnam/Genuine Bezels I've seen another Genuine MK1 insert on the internet that looks fatter/slimmer - how can that be? As Explained somewhere in the middle of this post, "Fat Fonts" were the result of worn out printing pads, so other inserts that are MK1 and less fat were created earlier when the printing pads were less worn. Some other inserts were created later when inserts were even more worn out (for example, the following ultra fat insert, where the 5 started to bleed into the 0: https://imgur.com/a7wjKOP ) Are these perfect? Probably not - nothing is 100% perfect. However, it is my opinion that these are by a wide margin the best inserts you can get, unless you want to spend 2000$+ on a Genuine Insert. Pics: Snap-in Fit in a Cartel Bezel, will sit slightly recessed as on a Gen Bezel: Slim Edge Custom MK1 Insert (left) next to a Cartel Insert (right):

Shamed be he who thinks evil of it Perhaps he wants to clear out old stock. I don't know enough about 5711s to give you a definitive answer, but there should be plenty of posts re: the 5711 either on this forum or on RWI, so try using the search function if nobody chimes in here.