Hello All, A while ago I described testing done on my Omega Seamaster Polaris “Titane”. Though I find the watch aesthetics really cool, and timekeeping performance superlative (a few seconds a year), I had not worn the watch until now. The reason for this is that I wanted to rejuvenate the lume on the watch. It had aged rather ungraciously and gave the watch a tired look. At first I thought of just reluming the hands, which is relatively easy to achieve, but a watchmaker recommended against that because the new lume on the hands would clash with the old lume on the dial. The lumed hour markers on the watch are “cabochon” type, that is, hemispheres. How does one make hemispheres of lume? So for several moons I contemplated reluming the watch fearing it would permanently damage the watch dial (and in the meantime purchased three other vintages watches…). This week I finally decided to take the plunge. Here’s how I did it. I decided to mold the hemispheres out of lume. I took close-up photographs of the original lume cabochon and determined they were 1 mm in diameter. To make the mold, I found 1 mm diameter ball bearings on ebay and I had a piece of teflon sheet. I put several of these ball bearings on the sheet and laid on each side of a 0.5 mm brass shim stock. I then pressed the ball bearings into the soft teflon sheet with a press. Because of the shims the ball bearings only went halfway into the teflon. Removing the ball bearings from the teflon I had nice 0.5 mm deep and 1 mm diameter indentations to mold the lume material. Being teflon, the lume material should be easy to demold. I mixed the lume material as described in the above mentioned video and prepared a dozen hemispheres using the Teflon mold I had done. 1 mm ball bearings Teflon sheet with mold, filled mold and newly formed cabochon. Removing the original cabochon from the dial was relatively straightforward: all was needed was to pinch the cabochon with a pair of fine tweezers and gently twist back and forth in a circular motion to released them from the dial. To affix the newly created cabochons I simply used a tiny drop of binder liquid that came with the lume kit. This way I attached the 11 hemispheric hour markers on the dial. Although not as perfect in shape as the original hours markers, I am very happy with the outcome. The dial looks a lot fresher with the new lume. One needs a good loupe to see the markers are homemade. The main issue I encountered came from the thin printed white ring around each cabochon that sometimes slightly ripped out when I removed the original cabochons. Enjoy the pictures. Michel
Good result . Can't you apply cabochon lume dots just by painting or dropping the lume onto the dial? Or doesn't surface tension hold the drop well enough and it seeps away.
Thanks for the nice comment. I could had tried it that way but I thought the shape would be more consistent by molding. Less chance of messing up the dial.
Excellent work and a nicely creative solution to making the lume dots In my limited experience of Polaris models, it would appear that the lume formulation seems to degrade to an inactive brown colour fairly often. My Titane auto certainly has! It went off for an STS service recently and I asked about reluming. Unfortunately, as it has "nipple" style lume dots, the most cost-effective solution was a complete dial replacement at around £400, so I just had the hands replaced.
That's the way it's normally done. The ratio of binder to lume can be played with to determine the slump (to use a concrete term)...
It's a small watch by today's standards. I removed two more links from the bracelet! I must have small wrists!
By the way, a bit of thread drift on my part: it's interesting to note how watches perceived value changes over time. Here's a catalog listing of the said watch and its price, compared to a Speedmaster of the same catalog. Prices in Deutsche Marks.
