THE SETUP
You gotta love the Noob factory, or N Factory to others, they make some of the most spectacular watches in this new era of reps. All those Pams, the AP ROOS, they are all so meticulously replicated and of such high quality it’s a magnificent age. But how about those ceramic Rollies?….yeah, how about them? They are equally spectacular on their own, very fine construction and high quality feel but as far as the accuracy of the replication, there are many flaws and most of them are just ridiculous. There’s no logical reason why this preeminent rep watch factory organization can’t get right some of the incorrect things about this line of watches, but alas, they don’t and these blatant flaws persist even with the most recent releases. And how about those crazy green hands on the newest “super lumed” GMT II C…permanently lumed super green…great. don’t get me started, this isn’t about the problems of the noob rollie ceramics, its about trying to easily mod one of the most very obvious flaws of the noob Rolex ceramic line….the color and texture of the engraved bezel markers. Of course the pearl is another major problem with the only real option being to completely replace or mod significantly. DarthAlex posted about a rebuild using a Watchmaterial pearl lens and the noob base but RG modder pBdad has a very nice mod that he does using the noob pearl base/cup, you’ll see some pBdad pearls near the end of this post.
the new BP factory Rollies seem to have gotten the pearl right now but the bezel engravings, while improved in depth, they went too far and they look much too deep and wide AND they still paint them with the off white paint.
The ceramic engraved bezel markers and numbers are some of the biggest features on the watch and are one of the key things that draw your eyes when you see the watch and they are blatantly the wrong type of paint and color. The thing is that the noob rollies do quite accurately “simulate” the right color of one of the “states” that the gen platinum markings exhibit, but therein lies the issue, the fact that the gen platinum markings have color states due to the nature of light reflecting on a metal.
After seeing many gens my personal watch ocd would no longer let me live with this particular noob simulation and I was resolved that this must be changed for my pieces. Interesting how we can live perfectly fine with some flaws while others drive us to exasperation…but that’s another thread entirely.
I had seen a few threads over the last couple of years where members had posted how they painted their bezel numbers and many of them were just plain even more incorrect than what the watch came with and then there was a period where everyone was searching for models with more brighter white bolder markings…and then the good old noob started making them that way and this fallacy of what the markings should actually look like was further entrenched. I have been around here long enough now to see some newer forum members posting about their “ultimate builds” where they are instructing some of the best modders out there today to paint their bezel numbers as bright a white as possible. And then this is posted up here and elsewhere as an “ultimate build”…and so this disinformation continues throughout our community.
There have been some really good paint jobs posted up by some of our more skilled folk here but they didn’t go into really good detail on exactly how this paint job was performed. There have been some other tuts on this procedure but they are using the wrong type of paint and color ultimately and I have seen some paint mods that are just plain too silvery chrome. Another thing is that this whole thing needs to be done with extreme finesse or the sloppy end result, even microscopically, leads to poor presentation and then brings down the whole look of the watch.
There was another great tutorial, not sure if it’s here or over on rg, but it’s buried and you have to search for it and the last time I went to check it, the pictures were missing. So I think it’s a good time to do a full tutorial on this mod that will produce extremely accurate and gen-like results with a relatively minimum amount of effort with the only caveat being some skill will be required in the way of a steady hand. So I bring to you…The pilworx Penultimate Platinumizing Procedure.
THE PLATINUM STANDARD
Let’s start with a brief vid on how Rolex does it. In this example we see the gold procedure for the two tone ceramics. It’s the same for platinum.
The noob markers are currently painted with a flat, off-white. Grab a loupe and inspect yours and you will see under magnification how poorly it is applied; doesn’t go all the way up the sides of the engravings and/or it is over the edge of the markers and is on the shiny part of the ceramic bezel face. You’ll also see small pieces of fuzz and dust dried onto and into the white paint, nice. Since we’re looking critically at the engravings might as well establish the flaws besides the paint; on the Subs the minute markers are too thin and too tall, they go too close to the outside edge of the ceramic insert and there are some minor inconsistencies with the number fonts. On the gen GMTII all the numbers have a curvature to their horizontal lines so that the numbers appear to ever so slightly follow the curvature of the ceramic insert, and the zeros have a tiny bulge. These tiny details are missing on the noob. Also the gen engravings are quite deep and very precise, the noobs are precise enough but about half the depth.
The main issue with the noob flat off-white markers is that this color “simulates” only one color state of the gen platinum markers. See below where based on the given lighting conditions and viewing angle a gen’s markers can look identical to the noob’s.
This is awesome if you only ever look at your watch in pictures and never plan to actually wear it in 3D. It matches the gen bezel perfectly. ;-)
Platinum, like any metal, exhibits a different color depending on what angle the light is reflecting off of it. Sure it can look white, or off-white, or grey, brownish tan, or silver…
or if the light is right, the tiny platinum particles, which also give the coated engravings a texture, can manifest as sparkly silver.
The only texture the noob engravings have is the odd piece of dust encapsulated in the paint job, otherwise the white paint is pretty smooth and flat.
Look at this gen Hulk, the light coming from the top of the bezel makes the triangle look quite white but look at those markers at the bottom of the bezel, they’re downright silvery gray.
So depending on your viewing angle the gen markers change color, and as you move the watch around you can see this color morphing. The noob’s simply look off-white all the time regardless of angle and forget about them ever looking sparkly.
THE MOD
You will see some members trying to scrape out all the white paint from the noob engravings and while this can achieve initially a deeper engraving you are only going to fill it up with paint again so getting deeper engravings is not going to happen. Some of these scrape jobs I’ve seen end up with a much too thick initial coat of paint which ends up drying blobby, combine this with the wrong color and a sloppy clean up job and you got a spectacular rep that has now been rendered much less spectacular.
If the noob paint is removed the new paint must be built up with multiple very thin coats to achieve the correct texture and this now turns into a much more time consuming complicated mod. Also if the noob paint is removed or you find when you remove some of the crap that might be stuck in the white noob paint there are divots in the paint and the painted surface is not smooth anymore, you will have to rebuild with some flat white paint because the uneven surface will show in the final process. I have tried removing all the white noob paint and repainting silver but this just doesn’t produce the same effect as a flat white base coat that then gets overcoated with the silver. The silver only is just too, well silver in the end. The silver over a white base coat produces a more pearly, translucent silver which is more gen-like. My approach is treating the existing white paint as a prime coat and applying a very thin, semi translucent top finish coat using the precise color that when combined with the white base coat provides an exact gen-like simulation.
Below you will see the supplies needed to perform this mod. I didn’t include it in the pics but I should add here that all the paint work and clean up scraping must be performed using a loupe. You must be very precise with both of these steps because the more perfection at the microscopic level the far superior the actual naked eye look of the watch will be. It is a Rolex after all …;-)
- Testors Flat Steel Enamel Paint (color code 1180-RM11801_0611)
- Testors Enamel Paint Thinner
- Small Paint Mixing Pallet
- Extremely Fine Thin Paint Brush for Painting
- Small Fine Paint Brush for Thinner
- Dry Clean Longer Bristle Brush for Dusting Away Scrapings
- Utility Knife Razor Blade
- Scrap Paper for Unloading Brush
I had a noob sub caseset that I used as the guinea pig to develop this technique and I tried multiple paint and paint/thinner formulations to arrive at the final mod which I did to my GMTII for this tutorial. I plan on also doing my DSSD, my Shark and my new Hulk, but as all these have pearls, which MUST be removed before painting, I opted for the GMTII first. (don’t get me started on the pearls again, my other ocd tick) Best way to remove the pearls is to take the tip of a hot soldering iron and carefully touch it to the metal surround of the pearl. heat it up for a good 20-30 seconds and then carefully try to slowly pry the pearl up with the tip of a razor blade. if you don't heat it and soften the glue first you run a very high risk of cracking the ceramic insert when you try to pry or force the pearl off. trust me, i've effed an insert that way. thanks to Pbdad for the inspirational advice on how to remove pearls. he uses a torch but that's way too scary for me. ;-)
One of the more interesting paint jobs I’ve seen posted about was where a member used car paint. I initially thought this would be a good choice too so I went out and got some platinum car touch up paint. The paint swatch at the auto store looked like it would be the perfect choice but when I actually started to work with the paint and tried to thin it the metallic particles in the paint turned out to be much too big and in no way matched the tiny gen platinum particles. It was also way too glossy when dry and actually dried quite a dark grey color. I needed a paint that would have significantly smaller metallic particles in the paint and appear relatively flat when dry but still have metallic particles in it. After some trial and error I settled on the Testors Flat Steel enamel. It has the right metal shade and the tiny metallic particles in the paint are super small. This paint and the thinner can be bought at any hobby shop or art store.
The brush used to apply the paint mix must be extremely small and fine. I went to an art store and got the very smallest one they sold.
Start by removing the bracelet from the watch head, it’s much too awkward to work under a loupe and trying to make minor adjustments to the watch head while you work on it and have the bracelet clanking around.
Next, dab a small amount of the thinner on a lint free cloth and give your bezel a nice quick clean. Under the loupe look for any of those dried on dust and lint particles in the white paint and use the razor blade tip to remove them. You don’t want to paint over them. You want the white engravings to be as clean and pure as possible.
Now it’s time to make the magic paint mix. Shake the Testors paint bottle vigorously to mix it thoroughly then open it up and dip the entire tip of your fine brush in the paint and deposit a drop of paint into one of the pallet wells. Dip in the paint again and add a second drop to the one you just put in the pallet well. Now use your second small brush and dip into the thinner and add a drop to the well just above where your 2 paint drops are so that it runs down and into the paint. The idea here is you are not contaminating your thinner brush with paint. Add another 7 drops of thinner to the paint; 2 drops of paint to 8 drops of thinner is the mix. This will give you more than enough to paint your entire bezel without the paint in your pallet drying out. The thinner will evaporate before the paint and leave a thick goo in the bottom of the pallet before you finish painting if you just do a 1 to 4 mix and you do not want to apply the paint when it is thick.
Mix the paint/thinner mix in your pallet with your painting brush well until you have a consistent color. Now unload all of the paint off your brush by wiping it on the scrap paper. Take your now dry paint brush and carefully dip it into your mixture to just get a small amount of paint mix on the tip of the brush.
Time to don your loupe. Bring the brush over to the first engraving and gently touch the loaded brush tip to the end of one of the markings. Capillary action will draw the very liquid paint/thinner mix into the engraving channel. You don’t so much have to use any kind of brushing action with the brush as you will find you merely have to guide the liquid through the entire channel with the tip of the brush. Depending on how big the engraving you are doing is you may have to dip in for more paint. Let the paint fill the entire channel and even spill over the edges onto the shiny ceramic bezel face. You want to make sure you are completely covering the entire interior of the engraving channel. Don’t worry about this spillage onto the bezel face as long as you are not spilling an excess amount beyond the actual edge of the bezel insert. If you get paint between the insert and the crystal or the insert and the edge of the steel bezel you are going to have a problem getting this off later. So try to avoid this much spillage.
When you first apply the paint it will very quickly fill up the engraving and appear like you have completely eliminated the look of a recessed engraving. Don’t freak out, when this mixture completely dries and all the thinner evaporates you will still have a nice recessed look to the markings. The thinner actually quite quickly begins to evaporate right away.
You should remix the paint in your palette well after about 2 engravings as the paint and thinner start to separate sitting there in the palette quite quickly. Just remember to unload the brush on the paper before applying again because if you bring the brush over to paint with a ton of the mixture on the brush you are going to make a big mess on the bezel and get paint between the insert and the crystal.
You should very quickly be able to do the entire bezel in about less than 2 minutes…easy peasy. Now place the watch head under something so it can dry and not get any dust on it. This type of enamel paint doesn’t fully cure and get hard until after a couple of days and you definitely do not want to try to do the scraping off of the excess paint until it has had a good chance to dry. The problem is that it looks like the paint is dry within a couple of minutes but if you try to start taking off the excess right away you will find the scrapings getting stuck in the still tacky paint inside the engravings and the job is now ruined.
***SEALING THE SILVER PAINT***
After some time now it has become apparent that there are a few different types of noob bezels out there with perhaps a few different types of white paint in the engravings and the success long term of the thin silver coating on the white base is questionable so I have developed a Sealing Procedure using Testors Dullcoat Lacquer (product code 1160X for the small liquid bottle and 1260T for a spray can) and Testors Lacquer Thinner (product code 1159) I couldn’t find the liquid locally so I simply sprayed some of the spray lacquer into the cap of the spray bottle and used the liquid from there to mix in with my thinner. DO NOT use Testors Glosscoat, it's the glossy version of a sealer, Dullcoat is...well, not glossy m'kay?
After the silver has completely cured, make a 1:1 Dullcoat/Thinner mixture and apply to all the engravings exactly the same way as the silver paint: let a drop of the Dullcoat mixture flow from the brush tip into the engravings to completely fill them. Wait at least a good 24 hours for this to cure and you’re ready to do the scraping. With a fully sealed and cured engraving I was able to quite vigorously rub the engraving with some abrasive tissue paper and do almost no damage to the silver appearance so I feel pretty confident a properly sealed pPPP will last a good long time.
My Hulk, Shark and DSSD fully painted and sealed, ready for scraping.
Took the opportunity to put the correct handsets on the two subs as well.
I waited until the next day to do the scraping. The enamel isn’t fully cured yet but definitely dry to the touch and in no way tacky. Again, the scraping must be done under a loupe because you need to be extremely exact in removing the excess paint from the bezel surface and very careful not to let the tip of the blade slip into the engraving because it will scratch off your new platinum coating in an instant leaving a mark. The enamel is dry but still soft and easily marred by a sharp blade tip. If this happens the paint job on that particular engraving is screwed and will need to be redone. You may not think it’s a big deal and you may not see it with the naked eye but do that to every single engraving multiple times and I guarantee the overall presentation of this mod will be diminished as a multitude of small scratches will manifest to the eye.
If you make a mark with the blade in the engraving don’t worry, simply take your lint free cloth with a small dab of thinner and you can easily remove all the paint from that engraving leaving the white base clean again. Now simply redo that engraving. Bad part is you now have to stop and wait until the next day again. This happened to me a couple of times and in fact I redid the 12 o’clock triangle 3 times because the paint did not look consistent throughout the entire area. It was actually a little tough to do the triangle because it is a much larger open area compared to the number engravings. I eventually found that if I did it with a nice initial load of paint on the brush so that it filled the area on the first go that this worked evenly.
The task now is to bring the edge and tip of a minty new utility blade to the bezel surface at an angle to remove the excess paint spillage on the shiny bezel surface by scraping. This might sound like a recipe for disaster but amazingly the shiny bezel is extremely scratch resistant and I believe you would have to apply a great amount of force with the blade tip to actually scratch the bezel surface. You will find you do not have to apply much force at all to remove the paint from the shiny bezel surface.
I found the best way to avoid slipping into the engraving channel is to scrape with the blade positioned past a channel and work back to the edge of the engraving as opposed to putting the blade tip up to the edge of an engraving and then scraping.
Scrape a bit and then use your slightly larger dry new brush to whisk away the scrapings. Be careful and exact to remove all the excess paint from the shiny bezel surface right up to the edge of the engraving. This is where the steady hand comes into play. Also because the bezel is so shiny you need to move it around in the light to inspect your work as you go because it can be easy to miss small amounts of paint on the bezel due to light reflections.
mmmmm...platinummy
Work your way all around the bezel until done and then give the whole thing a nice rub down with your lint free cloth. Reinstall your bracelet and voila…revel in the platinum-like gen-ness of your new bezel.
THE RESULTS
Here’s a pic of the finished GMTII next to the Sub caseset I used to experiment with. The 55 minute bezel mark and pearl triangle on the Sub have not been painted and show the stock off-white paint. Look at the differences between the way they look and the engravings on the GMTII look. The 8 and the 6 on the GMT look white but the numbers on the left hand of the bezel are catching the light differently and appear grayish silver. The stock noob off-white always looks just white no matter what angle you view it from.
Some very nice simulation of the gen platinum texture can be seen here.
At the microscopic level the 4P mod is almost exact to the gen:
Outside under natural diffused daylight the numbers look pretty bright white from straight on.
And from an angle with a bit of sunlight check out the nice sparkle coming from the tiny metallic particles in the triangle and the grayish look of the off angle 14, 16 and 18
So there you have it the pilworx Penultimate Platinumizing Procedure. I call it Penultimate because the definition of penultimate is, “the second to last”,
with of course the last thing you can really do to solve this flaw better than this procedure is to try to install a gen bezel assembly or gen insert which I see has been done to a GMTII recently, looks killer but mucho dinero. There’s also a member who snagged a gen DSSD bezel and he’s currently trying to make it work on his rep DSSD, I wish him the best of luck but this option is still up in the air as to the viability and of course it’s not everyday you can just pick up a gen bezel and/or insert. The pPPP will cost you less than $15 and just some of your time and results in a massively better simulation of platinum in all it’s states when compared to the noob’s flat off-white paint. So what are you waiting for?...go do it!
***BONUS CLASP ENGRAVINGS PAINT MOD***
This has been shown before but I thought I'd include it here, may as well do this while you are waiting for the engravings to cure.
You'll need Testors flat black enamel (product code 1149), some pointed Qtips and some nail polish remover.
This mod only works on the actually engraved clasps, not the laser burned ones like this:
If this is what you have, skip this mod, it won't work.
Paint over the clasp engravings with some straight unthinned black enamel. Make sure to overpaint them.
Allow 24 hours to cure and then use one of the pointed Qtips with just the end very lightly dipped into some of the nail polish remover to rub IN ONE DIRECTION across the painted engraving. The trick to using the nail polish remover instead of paint thinner is it pulls out the paint very slowly from the rather shallow engravings.
When the Qtip gets full of paint like this, ditch it for a new clean one with a touch of remover again.
If you pull out too much, don't worry, just finish the job and then repaint just the area where too much black came out and remove it the next day.
I was surprised how well this simple paint job worked considering how shallow the engravings are. Just go slow and remove only in one direction. Perfection and very gen-like.
SOME BEAUTY SHOTS OF THE 4P MOD IN ALL ITS GLORY
ENJOY ;-)
And finally, the pCrew sparkling in the sun
You gotta love the Noob factory, or N Factory to others, they make some of the most spectacular watches in this new era of reps. All those Pams, the AP ROOS, they are all so meticulously replicated and of such high quality it’s a magnificent age. But how about those ceramic Rollies?….yeah, how about them? They are equally spectacular on their own, very fine construction and high quality feel but as far as the accuracy of the replication, there are many flaws and most of them are just ridiculous. There’s no logical reason why this preeminent rep watch factory organization can’t get right some of the incorrect things about this line of watches, but alas, they don’t and these blatant flaws persist even with the most recent releases. And how about those crazy green hands on the newest “super lumed” GMT II C…permanently lumed super green…great. don’t get me started, this isn’t about the problems of the noob rollie ceramics, its about trying to easily mod one of the most very obvious flaws of the noob Rolex ceramic line….the color and texture of the engraved bezel markers. Of course the pearl is another major problem with the only real option being to completely replace or mod significantly. DarthAlex posted about a rebuild using a Watchmaterial pearl lens and the noob base but RG modder pBdad has a very nice mod that he does using the noob pearl base/cup, you’ll see some pBdad pearls near the end of this post.
the new BP factory Rollies seem to have gotten the pearl right now but the bezel engravings, while improved in depth, they went too far and they look much too deep and wide AND they still paint them with the off white paint.
The ceramic engraved bezel markers and numbers are some of the biggest features on the watch and are one of the key things that draw your eyes when you see the watch and they are blatantly the wrong type of paint and color. The thing is that the noob rollies do quite accurately “simulate” the right color of one of the “states” that the gen platinum markings exhibit, but therein lies the issue, the fact that the gen platinum markings have color states due to the nature of light reflecting on a metal.
After seeing many gens my personal watch ocd would no longer let me live with this particular noob simulation and I was resolved that this must be changed for my pieces. Interesting how we can live perfectly fine with some flaws while others drive us to exasperation…but that’s another thread entirely.
I had seen a few threads over the last couple of years where members had posted how they painted their bezel numbers and many of them were just plain even more incorrect than what the watch came with and then there was a period where everyone was searching for models with more brighter white bolder markings…and then the good old noob started making them that way and this fallacy of what the markings should actually look like was further entrenched. I have been around here long enough now to see some newer forum members posting about their “ultimate builds” where they are instructing some of the best modders out there today to paint their bezel numbers as bright a white as possible. And then this is posted up here and elsewhere as an “ultimate build”…and so this disinformation continues throughout our community.
There have been some really good paint jobs posted up by some of our more skilled folk here but they didn’t go into really good detail on exactly how this paint job was performed. There have been some other tuts on this procedure but they are using the wrong type of paint and color ultimately and I have seen some paint mods that are just plain too silvery chrome. Another thing is that this whole thing needs to be done with extreme finesse or the sloppy end result, even microscopically, leads to poor presentation and then brings down the whole look of the watch.
There was another great tutorial, not sure if it’s here or over on rg, but it’s buried and you have to search for it and the last time I went to check it, the pictures were missing. So I think it’s a good time to do a full tutorial on this mod that will produce extremely accurate and gen-like results with a relatively minimum amount of effort with the only caveat being some skill will be required in the way of a steady hand. So I bring to you…The pilworx Penultimate Platinumizing Procedure.
THE PLATINUM STANDARD
Let’s start with a brief vid on how Rolex does it. In this example we see the gold procedure for the two tone ceramics. It’s the same for platinum.
The noob markers are currently painted with a flat, off-white. Grab a loupe and inspect yours and you will see under magnification how poorly it is applied; doesn’t go all the way up the sides of the engravings and/or it is over the edge of the markers and is on the shiny part of the ceramic bezel face. You’ll also see small pieces of fuzz and dust dried onto and into the white paint, nice. Since we’re looking critically at the engravings might as well establish the flaws besides the paint; on the Subs the minute markers are too thin and too tall, they go too close to the outside edge of the ceramic insert and there are some minor inconsistencies with the number fonts. On the gen GMTII all the numbers have a curvature to their horizontal lines so that the numbers appear to ever so slightly follow the curvature of the ceramic insert, and the zeros have a tiny bulge. These tiny details are missing on the noob. Also the gen engravings are quite deep and very precise, the noobs are precise enough but about half the depth.
The main issue with the noob flat off-white markers is that this color “simulates” only one color state of the gen platinum markers. See below where based on the given lighting conditions and viewing angle a gen’s markers can look identical to the noob’s.
This is awesome if you only ever look at your watch in pictures and never plan to actually wear it in 3D. It matches the gen bezel perfectly. ;-)
Platinum, like any metal, exhibits a different color depending on what angle the light is reflecting off of it. Sure it can look white, or off-white, or grey, brownish tan, or silver…
or if the light is right, the tiny platinum particles, which also give the coated engravings a texture, can manifest as sparkly silver.
The only texture the noob engravings have is the odd piece of dust encapsulated in the paint job, otherwise the white paint is pretty smooth and flat.
Look at this gen Hulk, the light coming from the top of the bezel makes the triangle look quite white but look at those markers at the bottom of the bezel, they’re downright silvery gray.
So depending on your viewing angle the gen markers change color, and as you move the watch around you can see this color morphing. The noob’s simply look off-white all the time regardless of angle and forget about them ever looking sparkly.
THE MOD
You will see some members trying to scrape out all the white paint from the noob engravings and while this can achieve initially a deeper engraving you are only going to fill it up with paint again so getting deeper engravings is not going to happen. Some of these scrape jobs I’ve seen end up with a much too thick initial coat of paint which ends up drying blobby, combine this with the wrong color and a sloppy clean up job and you got a spectacular rep that has now been rendered much less spectacular.
If the noob paint is removed the new paint must be built up with multiple very thin coats to achieve the correct texture and this now turns into a much more time consuming complicated mod. Also if the noob paint is removed or you find when you remove some of the crap that might be stuck in the white noob paint there are divots in the paint and the painted surface is not smooth anymore, you will have to rebuild with some flat white paint because the uneven surface will show in the final process. I have tried removing all the white noob paint and repainting silver but this just doesn’t produce the same effect as a flat white base coat that then gets overcoated with the silver. The silver only is just too, well silver in the end. The silver over a white base coat produces a more pearly, translucent silver which is more gen-like. My approach is treating the existing white paint as a prime coat and applying a very thin, semi translucent top finish coat using the precise color that when combined with the white base coat provides an exact gen-like simulation.
Below you will see the supplies needed to perform this mod. I didn’t include it in the pics but I should add here that all the paint work and clean up scraping must be performed using a loupe. You must be very precise with both of these steps because the more perfection at the microscopic level the far superior the actual naked eye look of the watch will be. It is a Rolex after all …;-)
- Testors Flat Steel Enamel Paint (color code 1180-RM11801_0611)
- Testors Enamel Paint Thinner
- Small Paint Mixing Pallet
- Extremely Fine Thin Paint Brush for Painting
- Small Fine Paint Brush for Thinner
- Dry Clean Longer Bristle Brush for Dusting Away Scrapings
- Utility Knife Razor Blade
- Scrap Paper for Unloading Brush
I had a noob sub caseset that I used as the guinea pig to develop this technique and I tried multiple paint and paint/thinner formulations to arrive at the final mod which I did to my GMTII for this tutorial. I plan on also doing my DSSD, my Shark and my new Hulk, but as all these have pearls, which MUST be removed before painting, I opted for the GMTII first. (don’t get me started on the pearls again, my other ocd tick) Best way to remove the pearls is to take the tip of a hot soldering iron and carefully touch it to the metal surround of the pearl. heat it up for a good 20-30 seconds and then carefully try to slowly pry the pearl up with the tip of a razor blade. if you don't heat it and soften the glue first you run a very high risk of cracking the ceramic insert when you try to pry or force the pearl off. trust me, i've effed an insert that way. thanks to Pbdad for the inspirational advice on how to remove pearls. he uses a torch but that's way too scary for me. ;-)
One of the more interesting paint jobs I’ve seen posted about was where a member used car paint. I initially thought this would be a good choice too so I went out and got some platinum car touch up paint. The paint swatch at the auto store looked like it would be the perfect choice but when I actually started to work with the paint and tried to thin it the metallic particles in the paint turned out to be much too big and in no way matched the tiny gen platinum particles. It was also way too glossy when dry and actually dried quite a dark grey color. I needed a paint that would have significantly smaller metallic particles in the paint and appear relatively flat when dry but still have metallic particles in it. After some trial and error I settled on the Testors Flat Steel enamel. It has the right metal shade and the tiny metallic particles in the paint are super small. This paint and the thinner can be bought at any hobby shop or art store.
The brush used to apply the paint mix must be extremely small and fine. I went to an art store and got the very smallest one they sold.
Start by removing the bracelet from the watch head, it’s much too awkward to work under a loupe and trying to make minor adjustments to the watch head while you work on it and have the bracelet clanking around.
Next, dab a small amount of the thinner on a lint free cloth and give your bezel a nice quick clean. Under the loupe look for any of those dried on dust and lint particles in the white paint and use the razor blade tip to remove them. You don’t want to paint over them. You want the white engravings to be as clean and pure as possible.
Now it’s time to make the magic paint mix. Shake the Testors paint bottle vigorously to mix it thoroughly then open it up and dip the entire tip of your fine brush in the paint and deposit a drop of paint into one of the pallet wells. Dip in the paint again and add a second drop to the one you just put in the pallet well. Now use your second small brush and dip into the thinner and add a drop to the well just above where your 2 paint drops are so that it runs down and into the paint. The idea here is you are not contaminating your thinner brush with paint. Add another 7 drops of thinner to the paint; 2 drops of paint to 8 drops of thinner is the mix. This will give you more than enough to paint your entire bezel without the paint in your pallet drying out. The thinner will evaporate before the paint and leave a thick goo in the bottom of the pallet before you finish painting if you just do a 1 to 4 mix and you do not want to apply the paint when it is thick.
Mix the paint/thinner mix in your pallet with your painting brush well until you have a consistent color. Now unload all of the paint off your brush by wiping it on the scrap paper. Take your now dry paint brush and carefully dip it into your mixture to just get a small amount of paint mix on the tip of the brush.
Time to don your loupe. Bring the brush over to the first engraving and gently touch the loaded brush tip to the end of one of the markings. Capillary action will draw the very liquid paint/thinner mix into the engraving channel. You don’t so much have to use any kind of brushing action with the brush as you will find you merely have to guide the liquid through the entire channel with the tip of the brush. Depending on how big the engraving you are doing is you may have to dip in for more paint. Let the paint fill the entire channel and even spill over the edges onto the shiny ceramic bezel face. You want to make sure you are completely covering the entire interior of the engraving channel. Don’t worry about this spillage onto the bezel face as long as you are not spilling an excess amount beyond the actual edge of the bezel insert. If you get paint between the insert and the crystal or the insert and the edge of the steel bezel you are going to have a problem getting this off later. So try to avoid this much spillage.
When you first apply the paint it will very quickly fill up the engraving and appear like you have completely eliminated the look of a recessed engraving. Don’t freak out, when this mixture completely dries and all the thinner evaporates you will still have a nice recessed look to the markings. The thinner actually quite quickly begins to evaporate right away.
You should remix the paint in your palette well after about 2 engravings as the paint and thinner start to separate sitting there in the palette quite quickly. Just remember to unload the brush on the paper before applying again because if you bring the brush over to paint with a ton of the mixture on the brush you are going to make a big mess on the bezel and get paint between the insert and the crystal.
You should very quickly be able to do the entire bezel in about less than 2 minutes…easy peasy. Now place the watch head under something so it can dry and not get any dust on it. This type of enamel paint doesn’t fully cure and get hard until after a couple of days and you definitely do not want to try to do the scraping off of the excess paint until it has had a good chance to dry. The problem is that it looks like the paint is dry within a couple of minutes but if you try to start taking off the excess right away you will find the scrapings getting stuck in the still tacky paint inside the engravings and the job is now ruined.
***SEALING THE SILVER PAINT***
After some time now it has become apparent that there are a few different types of noob bezels out there with perhaps a few different types of white paint in the engravings and the success long term of the thin silver coating on the white base is questionable so I have developed a Sealing Procedure using Testors Dullcoat Lacquer (product code 1160X for the small liquid bottle and 1260T for a spray can) and Testors Lacquer Thinner (product code 1159) I couldn’t find the liquid locally so I simply sprayed some of the spray lacquer into the cap of the spray bottle and used the liquid from there to mix in with my thinner. DO NOT use Testors Glosscoat, it's the glossy version of a sealer, Dullcoat is...well, not glossy m'kay?
After the silver has completely cured, make a 1:1 Dullcoat/Thinner mixture and apply to all the engravings exactly the same way as the silver paint: let a drop of the Dullcoat mixture flow from the brush tip into the engravings to completely fill them. Wait at least a good 24 hours for this to cure and you’re ready to do the scraping. With a fully sealed and cured engraving I was able to quite vigorously rub the engraving with some abrasive tissue paper and do almost no damage to the silver appearance so I feel pretty confident a properly sealed pPPP will last a good long time.
My Hulk, Shark and DSSD fully painted and sealed, ready for scraping.
Took the opportunity to put the correct handsets on the two subs as well.
I waited until the next day to do the scraping. The enamel isn’t fully cured yet but definitely dry to the touch and in no way tacky. Again, the scraping must be done under a loupe because you need to be extremely exact in removing the excess paint from the bezel surface and very careful not to let the tip of the blade slip into the engraving because it will scratch off your new platinum coating in an instant leaving a mark. The enamel is dry but still soft and easily marred by a sharp blade tip. If this happens the paint job on that particular engraving is screwed and will need to be redone. You may not think it’s a big deal and you may not see it with the naked eye but do that to every single engraving multiple times and I guarantee the overall presentation of this mod will be diminished as a multitude of small scratches will manifest to the eye.
If you make a mark with the blade in the engraving don’t worry, simply take your lint free cloth with a small dab of thinner and you can easily remove all the paint from that engraving leaving the white base clean again. Now simply redo that engraving. Bad part is you now have to stop and wait until the next day again. This happened to me a couple of times and in fact I redid the 12 o’clock triangle 3 times because the paint did not look consistent throughout the entire area. It was actually a little tough to do the triangle because it is a much larger open area compared to the number engravings. I eventually found that if I did it with a nice initial load of paint on the brush so that it filled the area on the first go that this worked evenly.
The task now is to bring the edge and tip of a minty new utility blade to the bezel surface at an angle to remove the excess paint spillage on the shiny bezel surface by scraping. This might sound like a recipe for disaster but amazingly the shiny bezel is extremely scratch resistant and I believe you would have to apply a great amount of force with the blade tip to actually scratch the bezel surface. You will find you do not have to apply much force at all to remove the paint from the shiny bezel surface.
I found the best way to avoid slipping into the engraving channel is to scrape with the blade positioned past a channel and work back to the edge of the engraving as opposed to putting the blade tip up to the edge of an engraving and then scraping.
Scrape a bit and then use your slightly larger dry new brush to whisk away the scrapings. Be careful and exact to remove all the excess paint from the shiny bezel surface right up to the edge of the engraving. This is where the steady hand comes into play. Also because the bezel is so shiny you need to move it around in the light to inspect your work as you go because it can be easy to miss small amounts of paint on the bezel due to light reflections.
mmmmm...platinummy
Work your way all around the bezel until done and then give the whole thing a nice rub down with your lint free cloth. Reinstall your bracelet and voila…revel in the platinum-like gen-ness of your new bezel.
THE RESULTS
Here’s a pic of the finished GMTII next to the Sub caseset I used to experiment with. The 55 minute bezel mark and pearl triangle on the Sub have not been painted and show the stock off-white paint. Look at the differences between the way they look and the engravings on the GMTII look. The 8 and the 6 on the GMT look white but the numbers on the left hand of the bezel are catching the light differently and appear grayish silver. The stock noob off-white always looks just white no matter what angle you view it from.
Some very nice simulation of the gen platinum texture can be seen here.
At the microscopic level the 4P mod is almost exact to the gen:
Outside under natural diffused daylight the numbers look pretty bright white from straight on.
And from an angle with a bit of sunlight check out the nice sparkle coming from the tiny metallic particles in the triangle and the grayish look of the off angle 14, 16 and 18
So there you have it the pilworx Penultimate Platinumizing Procedure. I call it Penultimate because the definition of penultimate is, “the second to last”,
with of course the last thing you can really do to solve this flaw better than this procedure is to try to install a gen bezel assembly or gen insert which I see has been done to a GMTII recently, looks killer but mucho dinero. There’s also a member who snagged a gen DSSD bezel and he’s currently trying to make it work on his rep DSSD, I wish him the best of luck but this option is still up in the air as to the viability and of course it’s not everyday you can just pick up a gen bezel and/or insert. The pPPP will cost you less than $15 and just some of your time and results in a massively better simulation of platinum in all it’s states when compared to the noob’s flat off-white paint. So what are you waiting for?...go do it!
***BONUS CLASP ENGRAVINGS PAINT MOD***
This has been shown before but I thought I'd include it here, may as well do this while you are waiting for the engravings to cure.
You'll need Testors flat black enamel (product code 1149), some pointed Qtips and some nail polish remover.
This mod only works on the actually engraved clasps, not the laser burned ones like this:
If this is what you have, skip this mod, it won't work.
Paint over the clasp engravings with some straight unthinned black enamel. Make sure to overpaint them.
Allow 24 hours to cure and then use one of the pointed Qtips with just the end very lightly dipped into some of the nail polish remover to rub IN ONE DIRECTION across the painted engraving. The trick to using the nail polish remover instead of paint thinner is it pulls out the paint very slowly from the rather shallow engravings.
When the Qtip gets full of paint like this, ditch it for a new clean one with a touch of remover again.
If you pull out too much, don't worry, just finish the job and then repaint just the area where too much black came out and remove it the next day.
I was surprised how well this simple paint job worked considering how shallow the engravings are. Just go slow and remove only in one direction. Perfection and very gen-like.
SOME BEAUTY SHOTS OF THE 4P MOD IN ALL ITS GLORY
ENJOY ;-)
And finally, the pCrew sparkling in the sun
