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How-to: Gluing Dial To The Eta-movement Spacer Ring


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Hello friends,

Today i'm coming up with a guide to gluing a dial to the eta movement spacer ring.

1.) First thing you have to do, is gluing the spacer ring to the movement. Just apply some epoxy to the area of the movement where the spacer ring is gonna lay on, and wait some time until its fixed.

2.) Put very very little epoxy on the spacer ring and put the dial on. Make sure its just an itty bitty so is does not expand and accidently glue the dial to your overlay.

Now put the dial on. (This little epoxy surely would not hold the dial in place that strong, thats why we move on to step 3)

3.) now put a whole bunch of epoxy on the outside of the movement between dial and spacerring. That will glue the movement to the fixed spacer ring from the outside, so no danger of glue getting into the movement or gluing Dial to the overlay. Dont hesitate to put as much as you want :)

4.) Now you have about 10 minutes to align the Dial properly. Wait some seconds so it got a little bit harder, and then TAAAKE YOUR TIME to check every single date-day if its aligned properly. It took me about 4 whole turnarounds of the datedisc so that every letter is aligned properly. Once you have found the perfect position of the dial (note 0,000000001 inch might decide about whether some letters will be misaligned or not...so take your time). Anyway once you've found the correct position of the dial, wait an hour until things are secured together and there you go :)

It took me several tries to find out about this way. First i glued the ring to the dial and then put it on the movement...result was: letters 25-30 were too low in the date window which would have been a terrible flaw. Also gluing on top of the ring was not a good idea as i fixed the dial to the overlay! So after several misses i tried to glue from the outside :) and it worked!

The epoxy adhesive: I use slow setting 2 component expohy adhesive. It is very strong (25 Newton / mm²) so no matter if you jump around, have a plain crash or get attacked by a shark 100 feet under water, the dial is still gonna be in place beautifully aligning the date in your date window :)

I hope I could help you :)

Danny

Edited by FlipLockBuckle
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Errrr...now that you have glued the dial spacer ring to the movement and the dial to the dial spacer ring with as much epoxy as you like :blink: How will you remove the dial to get to the keyless works and dial side gears when something goes wrong? The keyless works is very easy to jam up if heavy handed...

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small amounts of hypo cement always worked for me

So how common is it to have a dial glued to a movement? Every rep I've ever had apart (only about 6 or so) used dial feet that attached to the movement. Depending on whether it was an ETA or a Chinese movement, the dial feet were then fastened to the movement by screws (Chinese) or friction clamps (ETA).

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The MBWs typically have the dial glued... This instance also comes up when building a watch where a genuine dial is used with an ETA (Rolex for example), as the dial feet are almost always in different positions (unless the genuine example also uses the same base ETA for the movement).

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honestly, 2 part epoxy of the movement spacer/ring to the dial isn't the best way. Especially for some models where the movment spacer isn't suppose to touch the dial.

The main purpose of the movement ring is to keep the movement in place in the watch case - that is also why they use case clamps and screws.

1. the dial should be secured either by its original feet or by double-sided tape (glue gets messy and may cause frictional problems if not careful)

2. movement spacer should be secured by case clamps and screws.

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