Hi rep folk - Happy New Year's Eve!
I'm working on a budget 6538 build at the moment. The base is the cheap Bond from Marvellous with a case marked 6541 (the same case used for the budget vintage Milgauss). I know it's very familiar to the modders out there - it has no case chamfers whatsoever, everything is sharp and the bezel can cut your fingers...
So far, I've:
- Drilled the lugs, counter-sunk them
- Filed chamfers on the case
- Polished and Cape Codded the whole case (which led to me thinking I'd poisoned myself as I coincidentally got a tummy bug the same day as doing the Cape Cod work, as it has "Danger of Death" warnings on the packaging..!)
- Replaced the plexi with a Sternkreuz Tropic 19 from Cousins. I distressed the shit out of it, and then polished it back to transparency, leaving evidence of "age"... (I'll probably polish a bit more of the scratching out before I reassemble it for the second time - see below)
- Bleached and distressed the insert (just a bit) and coloured the lume pip to match the dial
- Sanded and softened the bezel, and brassed it using a blowtorch
- Replaced the dial with one from Raffles. Coloured and aged the dial with coffee plus matt and gloss spray varnish
- Aged the lume on the hands with coffee
I took a few pics - but then realised that there were some "issues" relating to my l33t mod skillz.
In my usual absent-minded enthusiastic haste to get it all back together and on my wrist, I completely forgot to place the spacer between the dial and the movement - so the dial was clamped against the date wheel. Plus, I also lost the plastic gasket that fits on the movement ring and forgot about that too - and these factors meant that the whole lot moved about in the case once it was back together... As a result, the watch didn't really work very well.
Also, my attempts to glue in the crystal using just a little hypo cement had resulted in a hyper-thin string of hypo across the inside of the crystal. But that didn't really matter, as the crystal promptly fell out anyway.
Having realised my errors, I'm in the process of rebuilding it again. And while doing so, I wanted to attend to the silver hands as well - replace them with gilt. So to start off, I sanded the silver finish off the hands (to reveal the gilt colour underneath) and I've currently got them in an "accelerated aging atmosphere" that I read about - a vinegar and salt fog made by microwaving a vinegar soaked cloth in a container, adding salt and then putting the hands in with it for a day or so. It'll be interesting to see how that works out (or doesn't!).
However, the hands aren't right and I'd like to replace them. I'm thinking the hand set with code
AK from Tiger Concepts would fit the bill:
http://www.tiger-concept.com/hands-all.html It's a gilt set with a white seconds hand. Does anyone know this set, and whether the minute hand is the long 13mm one that it ought to be? I've searched but can't find much info on them. If anyone can confirm, or has any recommendations for an alternative set of hands, I'd really appreciate it.
