I got my gen SeaDweller dial last week, and my SSD Lite arrived today. Thanks again to Ryaku. I've got a couple of builds on the desk at the moment, but I'm waiting for parts for all of them, so I decided to just go ahead and knock this out tonight.
I was a bit disappointed in the condition of the gen dial--it had a TON of light scratches on it as well as the "mark at 9" that the seller disclosed. Oh well. I did pick it up super cheap, I guess that was why. I'd love to send it to Uwe to get it polished, but I'm a do-it-yourself kind of guy, so instead I polished it LIGHTLY myself. I used a felt Dremel buffing wheel (not the hard felt ones, but the kind that are layers of cloth stitched together) and went over the biggest scratches very lightly. It helped, or at least it didn't hurt.
Anyway. Here's everything laid out:
Gen dial on far left, a Swiss ETA, datewheel + overlay, WM pearl, original 21j guts + SSD dial.
Comparo shot of gen dial (left) and SSD rep dial:
and close ups of each. You can see the scratches on the gen dial, and the text in Rolex is slightly messed up
However, you can see that with a little light on the gen dial, the damage doesn't show very well. I'm hoping that means it's not too noticeable under a crystal.
Most important test: the gen dial fits in the SSD case. I was worried it wouldn't.
As you can see though, it looks a bit crowded. This case, like all SSDs, suffers from slight wokkiness.
I had big plans to fix the wokkiness on this case. The gen 16600 has a straighter rehaut. I went after the inside edge of the rehaut with a Dremel... I was pretty worried about ruining it, so I went really slow.
My original idea was to change the angle of the whole rehaut, but after about 10 minutes of grinding it became clear that wasn't going to work. There is no way I'd get the angle right all the way around, and I didn't want to ruin the case. What I settled for instead was "opening up" the inside edge of the rehaut, keeping the grind perpendicular to the plane of the dial. Here's a sort of diagram:
I ground the lip of the rehaut down, then used sandpaper by hand to soften it, then polished it, then rebrushed it to match the rehaut. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. You can sort of see the edge of it in this pic:
As long as the case is stripped down, now is the time to clean it, grease all the seals, epoxy the HEV, and trim the cg's a bit.
While the epoxy is drying, I trim the gen dial feet:
and install the dial and datewheel on the movement. I've given up on dial dots for this, now I just use glue. I find it's more secure. I've got to wait for this glue to dry now, too, so I install the WM pearl into the insert.
Movement cased up:
Next to it, you can see the hands that Ruprekt kindly donated to this project. I was looking for hands that have lume that will stand up to the gen lume, and these definitely fit the bill. Unfortunately, it turns out they don't fit--the hour hand collet is too tall! I dug up some ETA Noob hands just to finish the build for now, and I have some BK superlumed hands on order that I'll swap in later.
As you can see, the standard rep lume on the hands doesn't hold a candle to the dial.
I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. The rehaut trimming made a surprisingly large difference. I'll post more pics when BK's hands go on it.
(Man, some of those pics suck
I need photography lessons!)
I was a bit disappointed in the condition of the gen dial--it had a TON of light scratches on it as well as the "mark at 9" that the seller disclosed. Oh well. I did pick it up super cheap, I guess that was why. I'd love to send it to Uwe to get it polished, but I'm a do-it-yourself kind of guy, so instead I polished it LIGHTLY myself. I used a felt Dremel buffing wheel (not the hard felt ones, but the kind that are layers of cloth stitched together) and went over the biggest scratches very lightly. It helped, or at least it didn't hurt.
Anyway. Here's everything laid out:
Gen dial on far left, a Swiss ETA, datewheel + overlay, WM pearl, original 21j guts + SSD dial.
Comparo shot of gen dial (left) and SSD rep dial:
and close ups of each. You can see the scratches on the gen dial, and the text in Rolex is slightly messed up
However, you can see that with a little light on the gen dial, the damage doesn't show very well. I'm hoping that means it's not too noticeable under a crystal.
Most important test: the gen dial fits in the SSD case. I was worried it wouldn't.
As you can see though, it looks a bit crowded. This case, like all SSDs, suffers from slight wokkiness.
I had big plans to fix the wokkiness on this case. The gen 16600 has a straighter rehaut. I went after the inside edge of the rehaut with a Dremel... I was pretty worried about ruining it, so I went really slow.
My original idea was to change the angle of the whole rehaut, but after about 10 minutes of grinding it became clear that wasn't going to work. There is no way I'd get the angle right all the way around, and I didn't want to ruin the case. What I settled for instead was "opening up" the inside edge of the rehaut, keeping the grind perpendicular to the plane of the dial. Here's a sort of diagram:
I ground the lip of the rehaut down, then used sandpaper by hand to soften it, then polished it, then rebrushed it to match the rehaut. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. You can sort of see the edge of it in this pic:
As long as the case is stripped down, now is the time to clean it, grease all the seals, epoxy the HEV, and trim the cg's a bit.
While the epoxy is drying, I trim the gen dial feet:
and install the dial and datewheel on the movement. I've given up on dial dots for this, now I just use glue. I find it's more secure. I've got to wait for this glue to dry now, too, so I install the WM pearl into the insert.
Movement cased up:
Next to it, you can see the hands that Ruprekt kindly donated to this project. I was looking for hands that have lume that will stand up to the gen lume, and these definitely fit the bill. Unfortunately, it turns out they don't fit--the hour hand collet is too tall! I dug up some ETA Noob hands just to finish the build for now, and I have some BK superlumed hands on order that I'll swap in later.
As you can see, the standard rep lume on the hands doesn't hold a candle to the dial.
I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. The rehaut trimming made a surprisingly large difference. I'll post more pics when BK's hands go on it.
(Man, some of those pics suck
I need photography lessons!)
