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Datewheel Overlay Project


grifter

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Hey guys, I've enlisted the help of my good friend who owns a design studio to help me make some good DWO's. I will be trying to make vintage ones. I enlisted my friend because he's got the printers to make them look good.

I will experiment with waterslide and also different types of card stock. First up will be silver flat 3's. I will also eventually try the white round 3 open 6/9's from the 80's.

Any suggestions or help would be appreciated!! If you've got any straight on pictures of the gen date wheels, please post them. If anyone knows the dimensions I should make them to fit ETAs let me know.

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the really vintage ones are matte silver. The brushed silver is the service ones, at least that's what JoJo said. But if you're making one, I might want one! Stilty had the same project before, you might want to contact him for help.

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This is a dwo that I purchased from Andrew. Open 6s and 9s and flat-topped 3s. I am using it on an ETA 2824 in a gen 1601 with the gen pie pan dial that came in the watch. Lines up pretty good.

100_2897-resized.jpg

100_2898-resized.jpg

100_2899-resized.jpg

Sorry for pics. Watch is SS and gold with Silver dial and gold markers and hands. Still working on it...haven't sized the stem yet.

Edited by preacher62
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This is a dwo that I purchased from Andrew. Open 6s and 9s and flat-topped 3s. I am using it on an ETA 2824 in a gen 1601 with the gen pie pan dial that came in the watch. Lines up pretty good.

Looks good... are they a paper overlay or a sticker?

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I took one of the pics off the forums of a nice bold flat top 3 datewheel... saved the pic and printed it out to the right size on regular office printer paper. Looks damn good actually. Then i removed the rep datewheel off my ETA2836 and glued this one on instead... easy to make and lines up perfect.

This isnt the best pic for showing the datewheel but you can get the idea of how it looks.

All gen 16030

ETA2836

Dizzy date wheel

Clarkes ETA Datejust hands

Date snaps over perfect and all dates like up same as the one shown. Was easy to do. Everyone who is comfortable pulliing off a dial and hands should give it a try. You can make it as bold as you want and make the background whatever you want. I went for bold numbers with a dull white background.

post-6336-0-98631200-1300626095.jpg

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Nice Dizzy! Essentially what I was going to do, except I'm going to try it on different papers or water slide the numerals onto blank silver wheels (I read a great thread and this was already done and I loved the results! so I shall try it for myself).

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I took one of the pics off the forums of a nice bold flat top 3 datewheel... saved the pic and printed it out to the right size on regular office printer paper. Looks damn good actually. Then i removed the rep datewheel off my ETA2836 and glued this one on instead... easy to make and lines up perfect.

This isnt the best pic for showing the datewheel but you can get the idea of how it looks.

All gen 16030

ETA2836

Dizzy date wheel

Clarkes ETA Datejust hands

Date snaps over perfect and all dates like up same as the one shown. Was easy to do. Everyone who is comfortable pulliing off a dial and hands should give it a try. You can make it as bold as you want and make the background whatever you want. I went for bold numbers with a dull white background.

Looks great Diz. How do you print it the right size? That's the problem that I have had.

post-6336-0-98631200-1300626095.jpg

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Thats a borrowed photo TeeJay..I'm presuming here the OP isn't saying that these are his datewheels.

LOL I haven't begun yet! Yes these are all borrowed pics that I plan on using as reference.

I should have made that clear! My apologies.

My datewheels will have the numerals going in the opposite direction as these photos.

Ahhh, my mistake :bangin: Best of luck with the project :good::drinks:

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You are going to need to use something that is very thin. One of the problems with the paper overlays is the added height. Not a problem with some watches, but with ones that don't have much clearance between the dial and datewheel, you have problems with the datewheel hanging up and not changing properly. probably using waterslide decals would be the best solution.

At one time, I sent a couple of paper overlays up to Ziggy to use on a 1680 project. He wouldn't do the datewheel exchange, said that he had had lots of problems with the date hanging.

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I put these together for the two 6542s and another project ot two coming up. All are for ETA 28xx date wheels. I printed them on peel and stick photo paper. It works well enough, but the cut edges tend to not be sharp. I've had to adjust one that interfered with the mechanism. And it is a tad thick. The waterslide decal looked good, but was near impossible to position for my old and clumsy hands. I might try again using the Micro Set decal liquid. It helps in mounting. Keep in mind that inkjet doesn't print white, and you can choose clear or white decal paper. I tried painting a dial black and attempted to apply only the text/script using clear paper, but that doesn't work. Lighter colors, yellows, etc., aren't heavy enough to show up. I've settled on painting the background white or almond for aged look, and printing the full color dial. That works best, and I'd think the same for the date wheel.

Here's mine in full 2400 dpi, done by hand so they might need some adjustment. I use a program similar to Photo Shop and adjust size, resolution and move individual numbers with it. 

6542 aged

Mydatewheel.jpg

6542 white dial

226mmdatewheel.jpg

1675

1675datewheel.jpg

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So far I have been lucky with the clearance, but it can for sure cause problems. Sometimes I will use a slightly thicker dial spacer if the canon pin is long enough to compensate. If you use fairly thin paper, remove the rep overlay first and make sure its perfectly attached with no high or low spots because of uneven glue, then you should be ok. I did try an overlay on a ETA day-date rep and there was no way i could space the dial far enough to clear the datewheel and also still be able to attach the hour hand properly.

dizz

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On the GMT the canon is the issue, thicker spacer won't work. I used the peel and stick photo paper on the 6542 because I used an ETA 2893-2 movement, and removing the datewheel was more complicated than I wanted to tackle, and applying a waterslide decal with the datewheel in place is probably not a very good idea! . The ETA 2836-2 datewheel is much easier to r&r, so taking it to bare metal and maybe a bit more is easy. My next project will use the ETA 2836-2, and I plan on experimenting just that way using the waterslide decal. And I am getting a new printer that will print at 9600 dpi so I'm hoping the dials get even sharper than I've done them so far. 

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