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Decal printed dial

p0pperini

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Inspired by this amazing thread, I've decided to focus my attention for my own attempt at dial printing on recreating a model from my birth year, 1964. I found some great high res reference for a '64 5513 sold through an online watch auction house that I can use for source material. It has a gilt no date dial, meters first.

I have a graphic design background and have been using Illustrator and Photoshop since they were first released. A year or so ago I designed and created the artwork for a set of instruments for my friend and colleague who was hand building a car - a project that I enjoyed immensely. So naturally I had already been wondering if recreating a watch dial was a feasible project, before I came across this thread. I've begun dabbling in "vintegizing" rep Rolex, and this will add to that (if I can manage to pull it off).

I'd like to thank you Bart for your templates - they're an amazingly useful starting point for this project and give me a really good positioning guide for the elements I'm generating. What I've started to do now is use the very high-res dial photos I've sourced to recreate all the printed elements of the dial as Adobe Illustrator vector artwork. I can then either print the vector art directly onto the waterslide decal film, or rasterize it in order to introduce "noise" to whatever degree looks right (along with discolouration of the dial).

I'm starting with the depth rating and word Submariner. When you get in close, it's fascinating to see the hand drawn characters on these dials. For instance, in the first line, every zero is a subtly different shape. It'll take a few hours to hand draw these using the pen tool to outline each character and mess with the curves to get the tracing close enough that I'm happy with it. Here we go..!

WIP-dial-0118e09bae1cc9bbb0.jpg
 
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François.Fillon

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I've got some succes while building my 5513 Serpico Y Laino gilt dial about 2 years ago .
What I did :
- mirror polished my dail plate
- carved down the polished dial plate about 0.3mm where I wanted the white SYL wrtittings ... just used a diamond grinder on a dremel
- used a mix of whte/silver nail varnish to fill the sunken place ... taking care to put it "flush deck" with the polished part of the dial
- put my black decal on
- no varnish finish

Below are some pics of the result.
The shine of the gilt areas is too low IMO because I put too much layers of matte varnish on the decal after printing to protect the inkjet ink from water.
I will redo that dial, some day, using a gold plated dial plate and film-free decal so the gilt will be greater.

CYMERA-20170926-060745.jpg


IMG-20170508-150939570.jpg


Hi manodeoro don't know if you are tried with Laser printer but to me that's the best way to get a crisp dial and to finish I use varnish spray.
I tried lot of method and many printer settings with my Canon inkjet with no really success (at least 50 try...) , every time dial is not enough dark and finally turn to red after some time, and like you the Gilt effect isn't very good.
In picture below this is not very noticeable because my badly photo but this Dial was made with laser printer in real life result is very good and Gilt awesome as well (hard to catch with my old Iphone...)
Also Bart had advised me to use multi layers of "Cleopatre" Varnish spray on finish ... In France, you could find it in a shop named Cultura

IMG-17791.jpg
 
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François.Fillon

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Looks lovely François.

I just bought a laser printer specifically to print these dial decals, so this is encouraging to see!

Thanks Bro and Good luck with your decal, it's not a rocket science to do it but some skills are needed and lot of tests are required as well before done one good dial... And I don't talk about the lume this is still an other story...

But satisfaction at the end is very high when you did a good gilt dial made by yourself.
 
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p0pperini

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Thanks Bro and Good luck with your decal, it's not a rocket science to do it but some skills are needed and lot of tests are required as well before done one good dial... And I don't talk about the lume this is still an other story...

But satisfaction at the end is very high when you did a good gilt dial made by yourself.
Indeed, that's good advice - I know this is going to be far from easy... Having spent many years making scale models and scratch-building parts, I'm aware of how tricky this sort of artistic endeavour will be. My default approach is "learn by your mistakes" and I expect plenty of them... But I do relish the challenge and the potential end result!
 

Briteling

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I've been using the film free method recently, and it provides for a true negative gilt relief effect. The design I made in collaboration with a friend also provides a tropic effect, which is a gradient from the middle to the edge. The film free dials are very rugged quality, won't scratch very easy, won't fade within the next decade or two, are chemically resistant against a whole number of chemicals, even acetone has a hard time to dissolve it. Only it is obligatory to use a laser printer, which is not the best performer in terms of resolution. I've used several printers in a claimed to be high resolution, but actually the toner particle size determines what you actually get.

Here are some pictures of the results so far:
Yv2UNbB.jpg

a5R9O5B.jpg
 

Briteling

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Here are some pictures of what I made a while ago, still using film decal paper, I plan to do these again, with the film free method. I will also change the movement and modify with H6 kit. This 6538 watch will get a low beat movement, like the old genuine movements.

QzMLCTy.jpg

OQYnj1A.jpg

rEohHwi.jpg

MQtRuCR.jpg

uQXUTli.jpg
 

p0pperini

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No pics are showing Briteling. :(

Edit: deleted my questions because I need to do more research. Basically I need to work out the differences between water slide and "film free" transfers and what advantages/disadvantages one has over the other.
 
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Briteling

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No problem over here, I can see the pics just fine... Ik zou wel een terrasje willen pakken inderdaad, maar zit helaas gewoon op mijn werk...:(
 
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p0pperini

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Ok, here's simply a list of links to the images:
...
Only the 5512 is done with film free, the 6538 is done with film.
"Access to i.imgur.com was denied"

Imgur can't be used to post on RWI - Imgur blocks the site. It looks like it works if you try to link in the other direction too.
 
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Briteling

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How does this work?

5512-65384.jpg

5512-65383.jpg

http://i.ibb.co/gj9RHDB/5512-65382.jpg/img]
[img]http://i.ibb.co/3RStGRN/5512-65381.jpg
http://i.ibb.co/kympp9H/5512-6538.jpg[/[U]img][/U]
[img]http://i.ibb.co/nP7f3rm/5512-dial.jpg
5512.jpg
 
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dashing

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Ok, edited, now they work on my phone, so should also work with you guys...

the links to pictures hosted on imgur would only work if they're already cached in the browser (i.e. they've been visited before). Hence, it would not work for those who have not seen the images before.

can try using https://imgbb.com/
 
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