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Reluming Hands And Dials


vaccum

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  • 1 month later...
I'm about to order some C3 and try it out on some of my watches. How do you keep inside the lines on the hands and on the non-sandwich dials?

Practice and more practice. If its your first try, use a dial you don't mind if you ruin it. You need to put little dots till its done, take your time and you will get it.

Cheers, vaccum

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Do you use a paintbrush or some other tool to apply it?

I'm still working to perfect a dial luming technique (using the point of a pin), but I've found that a toothpick works great for luming hands.

Remove ALL of the existing lume by gently scraping the rear of the hand with a toothpick or soft wood stick. Just to be sure, I also soak the (unpainted) hands in pure ammonia for 15 minutes to get them absolutely clean.

Then reapply the lume (to the back of the hand) in multiple thin coats (3 or 4) using the side of the toothpick. With a thin coat of lume on the toothpick, I lay the toothpick, sideways, across the back of the hand so the toothpick bridges the two edges/sides of the hand and then slowly drag the toothpick from one end of the hand to the other (e.g., top-to-bottom). Do this a few times, slowly, until the paint forms a "skin" that fills the empty void in the center. Let it dry for several minutes and apply the next coat in the same manner. Once you're happy with the result, you may need to clean the edge(s) of the hand with a clean toothpick (if some of the lume paint migrated around the side). But, from the front, the hand should appear perfect. It's amazingly easy and I've done this on 6 or 7 sets of hands so far, including one very tiny set from a quartz watch and all came out perfect after only a few minutes of work (most of the time was spent waiting for each coat to dry).

It just occurred to me to add that you shouldn't be tempted to overapply the lume (in an attempt to try to make it glow brighter) as this could cause the hand to come into contact with the dial or another hand.

Edited by freddy333
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