Ok, the watch that got me into watches was the Rolex 1675. I've got a nice one, modded all to hell by Ko67, relumed by Cwazy, great piece and I love it. But....ever since I got it I had been wanting the watch that started it all - the 6542. Now, you can build your own and get say a Yuki case and bezel group, etc. But I wanted to keep this one on a budget so I decided to start with a decent 6542 base watch. Now, there's one factory making these watches and supposedly they come with a Swiss 2824 movement. Yeah, not really. It's a confirmed Asian 2836. But at least you don't have to pay extra for the "swiss" movement that's not in there.
The watch is pretty nice right out of the box. Yes, the rehaut is wrong, but I can live with it. The insert is acrylic and it's painted on the back side, as you'd imagine. No, the numbers on the insert aren't lumed. And the insert is really bright blue and red. It does have the cool "floating numbers" effect since it's clear acrylic. But it just looks too new. The dial is good but the hands - again - are just too new looking. And the hands are silver, which is correct. The case is fine but the bracelet kinda sucks. It's really well made but it's got springs in the links that allow it to stretch. So it's pretty damn stiff. Anyways, here it is, as I got it a month or so ago.
Now, the dial is printed in gold. So I figured it needed gold hands, plus the GMT hand sucks. So I contacted Daz and commissioned him to source me a set of gold plated hands and I asked him to lightly age them. I'm not going for the "abandoned in the jungle" look here, just a light aging. Daz came through and a week later I had my new/old hands. So off to my modder Kevin it went. Now, Kevin worked a bit on the insert to make it look a bit older. He also reworked the lume on the dial indices so they'd look more aged too. Then he installed the hands and this is how it looked when I got it back. Pretty damn good I think.
Well, today I was sitting here in my home office and noticed the bezel was turned a bit and I went to realign it and the bezel and the retaining ring came off as a unit. I'll get more into that later. But since I had it apart...I figured it was time to give a shot at doing something to the insert to try to age it up some. Now, I didn't want to strip all the paint off the back because I was concerned about getting the line between the blue and red just right. So what I did was lightly scuff the back with a green scotchbrite pad. Then I got my daughter's nail polish remover - Acetone babayyy!!!! - and I lightly removed some of the paint off the back. If you scuff it up first it will make the paint come off in a haphazard/random/really ugly way. Which is what I was going for.
Now, I figured since I didn't to strip all the paint off I'd just paint over the back side with black nail polish. So I asked my daughter to take a look at my insert and see how she thought that would coat it (She's 14 so you can imagine just how thrilled she was to be listening to another one of my "look at this watch" stories. Not). And she said "Don't use black. I've got a dark purple that is almost black but it's not totally opaque. Try that." So I did. And this is what the first coat turned out like:
Not too bad, huh? When I flipped it over to look at it I flipped out cause I thought it looked awesome! So I let it dry and slapped on another coat.
So I let that dry and holy crap did she have a great idea or what?!!! Doing just those couple of steps gave this insert an almost translucent bowling ball effect. Unfortunately it didn't do much to darken up the numbers but I tried. And here's what it looks like on the watch:
Not too bad, huh??
I forgot to mention what happened with the bezel. Ok, so the damn thing came off, retaining ring and all. So I'm looking at it and I see that there's some kind of glue all over the top of the case. The retaining ring isn't exactly a tight fit on the plexi. You can pull it off with barely any pressure from your fingernail. The bitch of it is that I can't just snap it back on because the damn thing don't snap on or press fit on. So I'm gonna have to send it back to Kevin to work his Jedi voodoo and then it'll be done. So if you get one of these 6542 base watches - be sure before you mod it all to hell to check and see if the retaining ring is glued on.
The watch is pretty nice right out of the box. Yes, the rehaut is wrong, but I can live with it. The insert is acrylic and it's painted on the back side, as you'd imagine. No, the numbers on the insert aren't lumed. And the insert is really bright blue and red. It does have the cool "floating numbers" effect since it's clear acrylic. But it just looks too new. The dial is good but the hands - again - are just too new looking. And the hands are silver, which is correct. The case is fine but the bracelet kinda sucks. It's really well made but it's got springs in the links that allow it to stretch. So it's pretty damn stiff. Anyways, here it is, as I got it a month or so ago.
Now, the dial is printed in gold. So I figured it needed gold hands, plus the GMT hand sucks. So I contacted Daz and commissioned him to source me a set of gold plated hands and I asked him to lightly age them. I'm not going for the "abandoned in the jungle" look here, just a light aging. Daz came through and a week later I had my new/old hands. So off to my modder Kevin it went. Now, Kevin worked a bit on the insert to make it look a bit older. He also reworked the lume on the dial indices so they'd look more aged too. Then he installed the hands and this is how it looked when I got it back. Pretty damn good I think.
Well, today I was sitting here in my home office and noticed the bezel was turned a bit and I went to realign it and the bezel and the retaining ring came off as a unit. I'll get more into that later. But since I had it apart...I figured it was time to give a shot at doing something to the insert to try to age it up some. Now, I didn't want to strip all the paint off the back because I was concerned about getting the line between the blue and red just right. So what I did was lightly scuff the back with a green scotchbrite pad. Then I got my daughter's nail polish remover - Acetone babayyy!!!! - and I lightly removed some of the paint off the back. If you scuff it up first it will make the paint come off in a haphazard/random/really ugly way. Which is what I was going for.
Now, I figured since I didn't to strip all the paint off I'd just paint over the back side with black nail polish. So I asked my daughter to take a look at my insert and see how she thought that would coat it (She's 14 so you can imagine just how thrilled she was to be listening to another one of my "look at this watch" stories. Not). And she said "Don't use black. I've got a dark purple that is almost black but it's not totally opaque. Try that." So I did. And this is what the first coat turned out like:
Not too bad, huh? When I flipped it over to look at it I flipped out cause I thought it looked awesome! So I let it dry and slapped on another coat.
So I let that dry and holy crap did she have a great idea or what?!!! Doing just those couple of steps gave this insert an almost translucent bowling ball effect. Unfortunately it didn't do much to darken up the numbers but I tried. And here's what it looks like on the watch:
Not too bad, huh??
I forgot to mention what happened with the bezel. Ok, so the damn thing came off, retaining ring and all. So I'm looking at it and I see that there's some kind of glue all over the top of the case. The retaining ring isn't exactly a tight fit on the plexi. You can pull it off with barely any pressure from your fingernail. The bitch of it is that I can't just snap it back on because the damn thing don't snap on or press fit on. So I'm gonna have to send it back to Kevin to work his Jedi voodoo and then it'll be done. So if you get one of these 6542 base watches - be sure before you mod it all to hell to check and see if the retaining ring is glued on.
