Apologies if a silly question, but the other day I was inspecting my year old Speedy with the accompanying loupe, admiring the detail on the face, as you do, and a thought struck me - how do they make the individual seconds markers and everything else on the dial? I'm guessing not by hand, so are they printed with lasers, or some other method?
Thanks in advance for any insight.

 

Like this I guess, but on an industrial scale.

 

Yep, they're transfers onto the dial.

 

No transfers are used.

That's a pad-printer shown above and it is an industrial scale process. There is a plate engraved with your printing off to one side, on the plate is a bottom less cup filled with ink. the plate is dead flat so the cup doesn't leak out. The cup is slid over the engraving leaving a deposit of ink in the engraving which is only about 0.001" deep. The cup never leaves the plate, it is just slid off to one side. A soft silicone pad is then used to pick up the ink and transfer it to the item to be printed. This works on watch faces or golf balls as the pad, the egg shaped thing in the picture above, is very soft. The ink is dry enough to handle by the time you unload the printed product so the entire process is done very quickly. A company I worked for bought one to label 3D glasses frames we were making for a movie theater equipment manufacturer, once we learned the tricks of the trade the process was quite quick and very reliable. Even the semi automatic machine shown above could easily outproduce the number of Speedmasters Omega makes. Each colour must be done seperately, so you either change plates and inks and run it through again or have a second machine set up to run the second colour. Which is likely what they do because the machines are relatively inexpensive and cleaning up to change colours is a royal pain in the ass.

This is how most enamel American watch faces were printed since the mid 1890s, including that lovely old railway watch face on @Mad Dog 's 992B Hamilton.

 

If you look on eBay you can sometimes find manually operated machines for not a lot of money. All you need is a rigid frame, accurate plunger to mount the tampon top (that's what the pad is called), and a method of accurately locating the part to be printed. When I get a dial made or redone, custom pates run around the $100 mark, so you could contract out the making of the die to any place that does pad printing or redoes watch dials. You could set this up in your basement (or spare room) if you wanted.

I used to go to industrial machinery trade shows in my former project engineer life (IMTS in Chicago anyone?), and I would come back loaded with free samples - invariably there were pad printing machine companies there stamping some trinket all day long and giving them away...

Cheers, Al

 

Check out the printing operation, right around the 3:00 mark.

 

if you ask me dials are probaby pressed then printed on special printers. Doing it with a baloon looks really non-productive so I don't think they make them this way. Maybe only prototypes.

 

No - pad printing is how they are made in production.

 

you might be right. google shows this machines can be totaly automatized.

 

Hear that Al.... you may be right!

Mmmmmm. Industrial trade shows, the junk I've brought home is sometimes amazing.

One of our guys hit a big electronic components show in China last year, there were so many LED suppliers with LED circuits and complete lamps powered up that they were able the power down all the overhead lights in the main hall to save power.