Vintigizing Pam Case...

[oswald]

Marco sent me a PM about "wabiing" my fiddy so I figured I'd lay it out as a regular topic.

First of all I'm no watch guru, I just sort of fumble around with them but I really enjoy it!. My hats off to the true masters of wabi but I guess they started somewhere.

For the case, I just stripped it down to nothing and rattled it around in a bucket of bolts for a while after duct taping the threaded parts and the counterbore where the crystal goes. After that I wire brushed it with an 8" brush on a bench grinder.

This pic is one of my first tries at making a plexi crystal which ended up looking a lot like a rolex tropic so I remachined it and gave it some more dome plus yellowed the inside with a highlighter.(Thanks Enzo!)

Turning the 127 into a destro involved carefully clipping the second hand stud off, grinding the dial feet off and flipping the dial around. I plugged the seconds lume cutouts with some epoxy. (You can still see the outline of them in the pic but it's not that noticable in person, plus the dial is sort of artifically pitted.) The hands were done with some varnish and stain and the dial was painted with flat black and daubed with a brush before dry.

Here's the "almost done" pic:

I plan on removing the foil from the movement plates, deblueing the screws and making a sort of yellowed bubble back for it as well as machining the engravings off the case back.

It started off with the cheapest cn mov't fiddy you can get. Sometimes you can have fun for cheap if you just want an old looking sanitized fantasy war watch.

I've been dreaming about building a nice MM destro with the molnija "rolex" movement and I may try it out now.

Oh yea, the strap is a BOB sportivo that I distressed. The cuts in the leather are from an underwater commando knife fight

[madasboot]

Amazing talent! Wish I could do it myself.

Thanks for your care and instructive post!

M.