Hey guys,

I've been on the hunt for some gold lumed NOS hands for my recently purchased seamaster. I've fallen in love with this watch but the hands are wrong for it and I would love to get them corrected. Problem is I cant find anywhere that has a set of these hands, I can always wait for some to come up on Ebay but thought you dudes may be able to help?

From the holes the hour hand is 7.5mm long and the minute hand is 10mm. I believe the movement is a 501.

 

Hi mate. How should the hands look? What is the issue with these?

 

Yo! The dagger indices have lume and the hands are black in the centre. Probably replaced during a service. Unless omega sold watches like this?

 

Radium lume can go black with age, especially in the hands. Have you tried lighting it up with an ultraviolet torch?

 

I didn't know that! Wow, I will have to get hold of one of those torches and give it a go. Thanks!

 

Looks great to me

 

Worth a try, I'd say. If the black part is glossy it is unlikely to be lume, however.

 

Not glossy, I will get a torch and take a photo of the results.

 

Regardless, I’d probably leave as-is

 

It is likely to be radium 226 in the lume, both on the hands (unless later replaced by an inert filler) and in the semicircular spaces in the bases of the hour markers. Just because it's stopped glowing does not mean it's inert. Radium 226 has a half-life of around 1600 years and is still happily pumping out alpha particles. What's stopped glowing is likely zinc sulphide which has degraded so it no longer reacts to the alpha particle emissions.

The fact that the lume dots on the dial and the lume on the hands is a different colour is not indicative of anything hinky per se. It's quite possible that they were sourced from different manufacturers, the radium based lume applied to them originally may not be exactly the same formulation, and even if it were, it's applied on a different substrate and may be a different thickness. All this may lead to differing colour as it degrades and also different reactions under UV light.

 

Thanks for taking the time to write this, really interesting stuff. Very cool learning experience, vintage watches have so much to offer.

 

So I was lucky today and ended up at somewhere with a black light. Here are the results.



Pretty darn cool... you guys were bang on the money.