Last Resort..Redial, Who is the Best?

Archer

For very simple dials, say those that are just a flat piece of metal, this might make some sense financially. But for complex dials that are curved, pie pan shaped, or other complex shapes like chronographs with sunken sub-dials, this would be very cost prohibitive, even if you could find someone to do it.

I have some experience with this, but not in the same way you are suggesting. I sent a dial from a vintage Rolex to be refinished at a place in Dallas that "specialized" in Rolex dials - it had already been refinished once sometime in the past and it was done very poorly. The dial was fully printed (no applied markers) had a slight curve to it, and my customer wanted it made into a dial with applied markers. The company said this was not a problem for them to do, but when they were drilling holes to affix the markers, something happened and the dial was ruined in the process - they didn't go into details.

They offered to make a new dial from scratch, and to do so I had to send the movement and case to them so they could make sure it all fit. Even with sending all that the dial they made was a flat dial, so no curve, and the dial feet were rotated a few degrees out of position, so the 12 o'clock marker on the dial was at 11:45 on the movement. It was a mess and the dial was unusable - this place told me they could do it no problems as they made dials from scratch all the time.

I've said this before but in the watchmaker community there is almost constant chatter about who is the best at refinishing dials, so the question comes up once every couple of weeks it seems. Various refinishing companies are heroes one day and zeros the next - consistency tends to be a big problem with these places. As the disclaimer on your investment fund says, past performance is not an indicator of future outcomes when it comes to these places. This is why I hesitate to recommend a specific place, because results can be so variable.

Cheers, Al

Archer

If you mean the printing part, then pad or tampon printing is the normal method.

It's used for all sorts of products and this is how the redial places reproduce a dial. The key is how accurate the plates are made, and to make an accurate version of the dial you would need a good example to start with.

Often some refinishers will offer 2 services. One is what I call the "close enough" service where they look at the dial you want, go through their inventory of plates, and pick what is "close enough" and reprint your dial using that. Then there is a premium service where they will custom make plates specifically for your dial, in order to get is as close as possible. If you have multiple colours of a dial, a plate is needed for each and there is a tooling charge to have each plate created. I can get expensive for a one off dial, and often even the premium service results in lines that are thicker than the original, and test being slightly different.

Cheers, Al