Look at the mark between 3 and 6 on the minute subdial. The watch was sold a few years ago with the seemingly original hands*
http://www.watchprosite.com/?page=wf.forumpost&fi=712&ti=809058&pi=5447328
There were blued hands available on this model but they were more slender, though these look pretty good on the watch IMO*
The dial looks good to me*
*not an expert
I'm sort of fascinated by the inconsistencies of the "7"s. Some are crossed (minute subdial, tachy register), some not (dates, hour subdial). Seems like an odd thing for a dial printer to do, although there are examples in Sala of this too.
Neither are redials, but they are not UG's best works either. Having been one of the most prolific watch manufacturers of their time, their quality control wasn't always up to snuff. Here is the same dial from Sala that Rman showed:
In this one you'll notice that the "Dato" of "Dato-Compax" is slightly higher than the "Compax" and the "Geneve" of "Universal-Geneve" is slightly lower than the "Universal" whereas those two things are oppositely true on the OP's dial. These slight discrepancies are within UG specs.
Is the 7 of 27 in the minute counter correct?
It seems odd to me as well as the overall font of the dial but I am not sure...
I would be great to see other Dato pictures
Edit: Ok, I was writing this while it was already discussed above...
Thanks Jordan for the information.
So finally, how can we be sure of a dial being a redial or not if UG had such imperfections in their dials? ^^
One way is to pay special attention to the font. If you find other examples of the watch reference with the exact same font, you can have some bit of evidence of it being legit.
The more example you can find with the same features/font, the better the chances of it being correct.
So finally, how can we be sure of a dial being a redial or not if UG had such imperfections in their dials? ^^
One way is to pay special attention to the font. If you find other examples of the watch reference with the exact same font, you can have some bit of evidence of it being legit.
The more example you can find with the same features/font, the better the chances of it being correct.
(a dealer) said that the previous owner had UG itself to provide the set of thicker leaf blue hands that watch is currently sporting because "he liked it more that way" and hence they are also original UG hands even though they post date the watch by several decades... Regardless if this is true or not I kind of have the best of both worlds as I will also have the original gilt stick hands if I ever want to change them back but I also prefer the look of these new thicker ones.
I'll post some more pictures once I get physically hold of the watch.
