Before going any farther with this thread, I have to publicly and loudly express my gratitude to RWI member
big eebee (he posted above). He gave me a tip as to how I could alter the color of the lume on the hands in such an easy and precise way that I am stunned. His magic potion is water color paint applied directly to the lume. Folks, I will never bake another set of hands again! Big eebee, I swear I'll give you rep points every time I see you post for that awesome tip. With this method you can make the lume any shade of any color you want! Friggin awesome.
I guess I should explain why this has been such a help. The hands have been heated and cooled twice, and I think they underwent some sort of annealing because they have become pretty soft and easy to bend. The hour hand got grossly out of shape when I scraped off my first attempt at lume. I straightened it out as well as I could, but it still is a little "off". I thought the hands looked pretty good as they were, but when I mounted them to the movement I wanted the lume to be a little darker to go better with the color of the dial. However, I dreaded pulling them off again because I was sure between the handling and remounting I would bend at least one of the hands (not to mention aligning them again so they don't rub). Enter big eebee with a PM that couldn't have helped more.
On to the pictures. After his PM, I raided my kid's paint sets to see what was available. This is what I had to work with.
The next thing to do was to set things up. I slipped a dial protector on in case any paint was slopped around. Big eebee told me that it would wipe off even if I did.
In this picture I have painted the second and minute hands, but not the hour hand. You can see that the lume has been darkened some compared to how it looked when I began. After playing around a little on paper first, I decided to apply some fairly watered-down orange paint to the lume then wipe it right back off. This gave me a color that was just a shade darker without going too far. I used a brush to apply the paint and a Q-Tip to wipe it off. It came off the metal part of the hands nicely as well, just like big eebee said it would. The paint is still wet in this picture.
Here is a photo of the completed process and after a few minutes of drying time. It is exactly the color I wanted, it only took about five minutes to do, and I could leave the hands on the movement. Big thanks to big eebee! The color I used is the dirty orange to the right of the movement holder.
