Krispee

7 hours ago, horologist said:

if you have a premade template  from a soft solid object when you press in the dummy dial, the holes will be a carbon copy of when you position in your new dial feet for the intended dial to sit on orthogonal to the plane of the dial! This way you will get to press it down firmly and get it dead straight!  Machining a shallow indent under your dial helps a lot but must also be flush otherwise you will experience the resulting feet to be offline!

 

there should be no issues with the dial spacer as everything would then be level and straight

I figured out the dial spacer, there are indents inside that fit over the dial pins and then sit down against the back of the dial. Unfortunately my spacer seems to have developed some slight distortion, it won't sit flush on a flat surface but wobbles. How that happened I can't say but I have bought another to replace it. I did machine a 'dummy' as you call it, and it did work, helped keep the pins pretty straight and aligned enough to sit in the movement, unfortunately one of the dial feet popped out when I was experimenting so I have bought some better glue to attach them with. You are right about machining the recesses flush (mine are just about there, could be a tad deeper), and also when you glue some escapes and you have to remove that also. I'm getting there.

I bought my dial feet from Cousins here in the UK. They are the type that are as 'horologist' suggested above, have a wider base that is 0.1mm thick and 2.5mm in diameter. What I did was machine a recess in the back of my dial to accept the larger dial diameter so it would sit (somewhat) flush with the rear of the dial. I have glued mine in with two part epoxy, pretty strong stuff, but not enough to keep them there if you try and adjust the perpendicularity of the pin. Mine were slightly leaning and I tried to move them, the whole dial pin broke away. I've create a fixture now that accepts the dial pins as they are in position. I put the dial and glued pins in this fixture and it keeps them upright, in theory.

Still wondering about the dial spacer.

I've been reading this, very informative. There is talk of actually gluing the spacer, not just the feet. Is that needed or just an option?