Double signed Universal Geneve

I fully agree with all of this.

I agree mainly because I have held so many Tris from the mid 40s, fitted with so-called “60s service dials”, that felt coherent and legitimate and as though all parts of the watch came together on the same day. The lume and degradation and patina matches the hands and the case perfectly in so many of these watches. The suggested two decade gap between dial and watch has never been apparent in any of them.

I have also always felt that the service dial theory swerves some pretty big questions. Why make a service dial for just for one model and not, for example, the jumbo cased Tri? When were these dials actually manufactured? Buba suggested “around 60-70s” but I find that hard to believe. In this era UG was surely more preoccupied with trying to stay solvent by rapidly banging out new watches rather than making new parts for old client watches from twenty years prior. If these dials really were printed by UG in the 60s then surely the lume compound would be wildly different and the dials themselves a closer, trendier cousin to Clapton? Why do we see so many horrible 34.5mm Tri redials if service dials were mysteriously plentiful and abundant for this one specific case?

Personally, I find it far more plausible that a batch of dials were manufactured and fitted to Tri Compax 34.5mm models in the mid 40s that, for reasons we will probably never know, deviated from the accepted cliche and escaped quality control. I find them more precious for that fact, not less!