sneed12

Since my other thread was missing the finished pics of the black one, here are some I took this morning.

Mods I'm still considering are finding a dial with thinner marker surrounds (I have one from a 21j, just need to have it lumed) and AR'ed cyclops (I have crystals in to Chief right now, one for each Sub-C and one for my GMT IIc). I'd love a DarthAlex pearl too, if he ever decides to sell them

I dunno. eBay maybe? The things are the next thing to free. You get like 2-3 in the bag when you order a Clark's crystal.

Yes.

I will post a pic if I get some time.

No hands, sorry.

I switched out my TW crystal gasket for a taller one. I didn't feel that it had quite enough rise to the crystal direct from BK.

I can't imagine why you would want to spend the money on a gen gasket, though. A quality gasket is a quality gasket. I just got a taller one and shaved it to fit.

I take the nylon sock and just stretch it out over the end of the hose (IE, you insert the business end of the vacuum hose into the sock).

Then I vacuum and all my parts stick to the outside of the sock; when you turn the vacuum off they fall out. I hold it over a bowl when I turn it off and the parts + hair + whatever falls into the bowl.

I just touched a gen in Tourneau yesterday, and it had 21mm lugs according to the salesperson. I asked specifically. (I did not bring my calipers and mic it tho)

Rolex isn't paying Eon Productions, Omega is. Cash is king.

That's a gen, no question.

2- If I have it polished, will it entirely remove the scratches?

Depends how deep they are and how aggressively you want the watch polished. The deeper they are, the more metal needs to be removed to eliminate them.

Does buffing thin the metal out?

If you want one with rehaut engraving, I'll swap cases with you. I was thinking about polishing my rehaut engraving off.

Rolex won't sell you parts, or let you work on it yourself.

Looks great.

I guess you'll have to have strict office hours from now on

I gotta say, man, it's pretty hard to say no to hot 19 year old girls who want to chat/flirt with you... yeah, they're probably just hoping for a better grade, but it's still pretty ego-stroking!

If it's a gen, just go to the AD...?

I should really clean those watches up and take better pics I'll try to do so next week after the family visit is over.

Also, if anyone needs a new-in-plastic Sub-C bracelet or a green ceramic bezel insert let me know. I have the two bracelets and 1 insert (broke one removing it ) from the TS subs.

DarthAlex recently posted on RWI a Sub-C build thread about swapping into a better case (as well as doing a dial marker swap, relume and all sorts of other crazy awesomeness). I got so excited by the thread that I (literally) bought a couple of Sub-C's from Timesshops that night.

They got in a few days ago, and I wanted to try and get this out of the way so that I can concentrate on a build for another member once I get his parts in.

I don't know if the cases I got are the same as the ones that DarthAlex got, and I didn't do exactly the same build. But I'm really, really happy with the results.

OK, so to begin: I got two of these in the mail from China.

Green ceramic bezel with black dial, 21j, pretty cheap. I don't care about that stuff since I'm after the case anyway. I've already popped the spring bar on the top in these pics. SEL fit is good for a rep but nothing exceptional.

Decent crown position, other than that fairly unexceptional. You can see that the caseback doesn't quite fit flush, which is wrong for this model (more on that later). The one thing these cases to have is FANTASTIC rehaut engraving. I mean the best I have ever seen. I'm going to call this the TS case, as opposed to the Noob case.

Font is correct, alignment is correct, size is correct. If it were a little deeper it'd be gen.

So I pop the caseback to find a standard 21j movement:

Nice to find a metal spacer ring, I was expecting plastic.

Now put all that aside. The "donor" watch is this one, my black BK Sub-C w/ skinny hour hand (lumed by RSH, installed by me)

BK's Sub-C is built on the Noob Sub-C as a base watch, with typical BK extras.

I start stripping the watch down, and discover something awesome. Note that neither watch had exceptionally good SEL fit--they were both good but neither was great. However, the Noobmariner bracelet is just a hair wider than the TS bracelet, so it is a TIGHT fit into the TS lugs. Now the SEL fit is excellent. Here's the Noob bracelet on the TS case:

At this point I strip both cases down completely to see what else is going on. Noob bezels are notorious for being impossible to remove, but the TS bezel has enough room that I think you can get at the paper clip retaining wire and remove the bezel itself without bending it (TS is the one with bracelet attached in all pics).

Someone with a more sensitive eye than me is going to have to comment on the CG shape, I don't know which one is more correct, but the TS looks fatter to me.

Lugs are also a hair chunkier, although it's hard to say for certain.

OK, at this point some students came to my office (I'm a college professor) so I had to take a break, and I somehow managed to screw up a bunch of pics in the middle (too out of focus to see anything). So we jump to the finished product here. In fact, the only pictures that came out were of my blue Sub-C (I ordered two cases so I could do both blue and black). The ceramic bezel inserts swapped without any problem at all, they were EXACTLY the same size.

Here's the finished product:

SEL fit was the same way with this bracelet, so with any luck that means the Noob->TS swap will always give good SEL fit

Here's something interesting. Remember how I mentioned before that the caseback doesn't sit flush in the back on the TS case? Well, it turns out that the Noob Sub-C caseback fits the TS case, and it DOES sit flush:

And the rehaut engraving:

Another interesting fact--the noob crystal will interchange with the TS crystal. So I have the TS crystals on their way to Chieftang, and I'll try to do an AR'ed cyclops mod. That and pearls are the only thing these watches are missing, as far as I can see. Maybe I can convince DarthAlex to sell me some of his custom ones.

It should. It can definitely be made to fit, at any rate.

Hmm, thought--if it's a ~98-2000 dial, should the case have lugholes?

Sneed,

I am curious about the rehaut. I have a gen 16660 dial going into my SSD and I want to know how much extra dial area you had to work with in order to mill your rehaut straight. Was it just right after milled, or just barely had enough to cover the dial?

There is more than enough, the rehaut still overhangs the dial quite a bit even after trimming. In fact, if anything I think it could stand to be opened up even more, I'm just nervous about destroying the case.

UPDATE:

OK, for the last few days I've been waffling on this one. Ultimately, I just wasn't happy with the condition of the dial. I wasn't sure what to do. I decided I had a couple of days to think about it because I was waiting on BK's superlumed hands.

Someone over on RWI made the suggestion of using car wax to clean the dial up. It took a few hours for it to click, but once the light bulb went on I knew exactly what to do... a dial is painted, and I know exactly how to polish paint!

So I went over to my car stuff and grabbed some Meguiar's Number 9:

I used a cloth buff on the Dremel and carefully polished the dial paint.

Here is a before shot:

and here is after polishing. (I know I take ****ty pics, but believe me, it's a 100% improvement)

That thing near the 12 marker is a piece of lint. That smudge near the 9 is an actual smudge, I didn't want to get too aggressive with the polishing.

While I had the movement out I worked on the CGs some more:

There's still a little nubbin in the corner, I now see in this pic :mad: oh well. I'll fix that later.

So now it's time to install the hands.

I cannot say enough how awesome these hands are. How bright are they? When I was unpacking them, you could see the glow through the tissue paper. That's how bright they are.

Like everything else associated with BK, these hands are absolutely top quality. They match the gen lume almost perfectly (definitely in terms of brightness). They're just a hair brighter than my WM9s.

Hands go on:

and watch gets cased up again.

I decided to try a comparo lume shot. Center watch is a BCE with standard rep lume, my BK/TW with WM9 dial and hands on the left, and the gen dial + BK/SL hands SeaDweller on the right. As you can see, the SL hands are torchlike.

I was this close to taking this watch apart and selling it yesterday, but now I couldn't be happier with how it turned out.

Also in Oyster bracelet

http://timesshop.net/7848-ro0004a-rolex-datejust-numberal-mark-silver-dial-upgraded-41mm-asian-clone-2836-2.html

http://timesshop.net/8010-ro1637n-rolex-datejust-numberal-mark-silver-dial-upgraded-41mm-jubilee-bracelet-asian-clone-2836-2.html

If you get it, be sure to post pics. I've been thinking about getting one.

The lume is gen-like, it had gen dial feet, and it has the white gold with no baseplate markers... if it's not gen then it's close enough to fool me. What makes you suspicious about it?

I got my gen SeaDweller dial last week, and my SSD Lite arrived today. Thanks again to Ryaku. I've got a couple of builds on the desk at the moment, but I'm waiting for parts for all of them, so I decided to just go ahead and knock this out tonight.

I was a bit disappointed in the condition of the gen dial--it had a TON of light scratches on it as well as the "mark at 9" that the seller disclosed. Oh well. I did pick it up super cheap, I guess that was why. I'd love to send it to Uwe to get it polished, but I'm a do-it-yourself kind of guy, so instead I polished it LIGHTLY myself. I used a felt Dremel buffing wheel (not the hard felt ones, but the kind that are layers of cloth stitched together) and went over the biggest scratches very lightly. It helped, or at least it didn't hurt.

Anyway. Here's everything laid out:

Gen dial on far left, a Swiss ETA, datewheel + overlay, WM pearl, original 21j guts + SSD dial.

Comparo shot of gen dial (left) and SSD rep dial:

and close ups of each. You can see the scratches on the gen dial, and the text in Rolex is slightly messed up

However, you can see that with a little light on the gen dial, the damage doesn't show very well. I'm hoping that means it's not too noticeable under a crystal.

Most important test: the gen dial fits in the SSD case. I was worried it wouldn't.

As you can see though, it looks a bit crowded. This case, like all SSDs, suffers from slight wokkiness.

I had big plans to fix the wokkiness on this case. The gen 16600 has a straighter rehaut. I went after the inside edge of the rehaut with a Dremel... I was pretty worried about ruining it, so I went really slow.

My original idea was to change the angle of the whole rehaut, but after about 10 minutes of grinding it became clear that wasn't going to work. There is no way I'd get the angle right all the way around, and I didn't want to ruin the case. What I settled for instead was "opening up" the inside edge of the rehaut, keeping the grind perpendicular to the plane of the dial. Here's a sort of diagram:

I ground the lip of the rehaut down, then used sandpaper by hand to soften it, then polished it, then rebrushed it to match the rehaut. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. You can sort of see the edge of it in this pic:

As long as the case is stripped down, now is the time to clean it, grease all the seals, epoxy the HEV, and trim the cg's a bit.

While the epoxy is drying, I trim the gen dial feet:

and install the dial and datewheel on the movement. I've given up on dial dots for this, now I just use glue. I find it's more secure. I've got to wait for this glue to dry now, too, so I install the WM pearl into the insert.

Movement cased up:

Next to it, you can see the hands that Ruprekt kindly donated to this project. I was looking for hands that have lume that will stand up to the gen lume, and these definitely fit the bill. Unfortunately, it turns out they don't fit--the hour hand collet is too tall! I dug up some ETA Noob hands just to finish the build for now, and I have some BK superlumed hands on order that I'll swap in later.

As you can see, the standard rep lume on the hands doesn't hold a candle to the dial.

I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. The rehaut trimming made a surprisingly large difference. I'll post more pics when BK's hands go on it.

(Man, some of those pics suck I need photography lessons!)

No. The click spring makes almost no difference.

Honestly, what I'd do is find a blank dial and print my name on it, or something. That's a cool custom Sub, but I'd go homage, not rep.

To each his own, though, it's your watch. Have fun. Cool build.

EDITED TO ADD: if you don't feel like finishing it, I'll take it. I'll throw a 21j in it, custom dial it and give it to my wife for her field watch. She's a geologist. I already have a black and green NATO to put it on.