I own a black dialed .004 and it is nearly impossible to tell that it is a pie pan. The characteristic that shows it is a such - apart from the facets on the dial which are close to invisible - is the minute hashes which are on the inside of the hour markers and are positioned in a straight line between the hour markers and not in a curved fashion as on the dome dial.
Dan, the pie pan is definitely not as well defined as it is for some other references like a 167.005, but it’s clearly not a dome dial which has a very gradual unbroken slope. Even the macro shots that you refer to show a line of demarcation where the dial slopes down. Look below and to the right of the date window. The line is there. Pie pan.
Note also, that the pie pans are 2-tone dials, and the dome dials are not.
I don't want to be argumentative here, since it really doesn't matter very much, but people are simply repeating over and over again that this reference is a pie-pan, without showing evidence of it. I was absolutely prepared to be convinced by some good photos, but when evidence is not forthcoming, and people just repeat claims as facts, it just tends to make me increasingly skeptical. I also know that nobody is obligated to prove anything to me, and that taking photos like this is hard to do.
😀
Just to clarify my point. I see that it is two-tone, and I see a line in the paint color, but I already know that there is a line in the paint, and I realize that the ability to see the line depends on the lighting. But these dogmatic statements don't demonstrate to me that there is a discontinuous change of slope, as opposed to a gradual continuous one. I focused on the right side of the dial, since the paint line was not as visible there, since I believe that the two-tone paint job (and the position of the hash marks) is intended to give the illusion of a pie-pan shape, and I'd like to separate the two issues.
If you want to define a pie-pan dial as a two-tone dial, I guess that's ok, but that's not my definition. I'm not disbelieving anyone, since as I already mentioned I haven't owned one of these. But if someone is really interested in illustrating that the dial is truly a pie-pan shape that has a discontinuous change of slope (i.e. sharp edges), then a macro shot at an angle showing the break in slope would be more empirically convincing than just continuing to repeat that it is a pie-pan.
Of course,
@ConElPueblo has already indicated that the break in slope is nearly impossible to see, which perhaps means that it doesn't exist. So perhaps this is really a semantic argument, i.e. there is no observable break in slope, but the dial is still conventionally called pie-pan because of the paint job, and perhaps because experts have historically listed this reference within the pie-pan category.
P.S. Apologies to the OP for highjacking this thread.
