Post pics of your watches Part II

I'd reckon spread of the madness Kostal. As the dealers and flippers and 'investors' get ever more hyped up and their prized models get ever more expensive they'll go looking around for similar/the Next Big Thing and the GP appears to be one of them.

Was watching a couple of the Belfast P&P guys vids recently where he's hanging out with other tulip farmers at dealer shows and a few times he says he doesn't want to just sell to other dealers, he wants to sell to customers(the one he does sell to buys a basic Sub. I'd bet the mad money stuff is all between dealers). The fact he says that should tell us all we need to know. It's an entirely dealer/investor based bubble egging each other on.

Been doing the WFH deal for much of the last week, and as somewhat idle hands will do...

I've not been happy with a couple of previous lume jobs I've done, or jobs others have in the past so got to work.

The Borgel cased Trench watch on the right had no lume when I got it, but I wasn't happy with the job I initially did with it. Too red/brown, too olde stylee 'vintage' radium. So I got shot of that(easy to do with enamel dials) and reapplied the pure Seiko lume I have. In the past I've always followed the procedure of premix the lume before applying. Problem was that the results were OK, but too samey. And it pretty much killed the effectiveness of the lume. So I got to thinking... Bad idea. 😁

Did some experimentation with 'pure' dried lume and very thin watercolour glazes with different mixes of browns. Lo and behold I had much more control over results and am also able to keep 99% of the effectiveness of the underlying lume. The Borgel is in the first stage. Four layered application. Bright as feck.

The Zenith in the middle needed a redial in the 90's, because it was like wearing Fukushima on the wrist(Scarily hot) and while it was a very good redial(though extraspecial should be all one word) the lume was whiter than a ghost's sheet and the hand lume was very sloppy. And any light lasted seconds. I was always loathe to attack it until I got enough practice as that handset makes a 1950's steel Patek look commonplace and it's a family hairyloom so... Luckily military lume in the particular in the 30's often looks like it was applied with a syringe rather than "printed" and is quite tubular and lumpy for the want of better words. I suppose to get the max thickness of radium for brightness(which means if it has the original stuff it's low level nuclear waste) so you have way more leeway than with say 1960's lume. Those Zenith's original lume rarely fills the underlying white numerals completely and looks quite "fuzzy". So base coat of pure, then very thin glazing to follow after it dries to build up the wabi sabi and the different tones I'm after. Ditto for the Doxa(the 8 is a bit wonky, but looks better in the metal. I may redo it). I'm pretty pleased with the results and as a bonus, because of at least four layers of lume they remain perfectly legible all night long after a charge. I'll attack the Borgel with glazes at the weekend.

Thanks B. 😊👍️ I completely forgot this morning, but after I hit the leaba last night I woke up bleary eyed at, well ten to one it turns out. Noticed the glow on my bedside table and took a couple of janky shaky pics and then nodded off again.

That's the pure Seiko base lume on the Borgel.

That's the glazed lume on the Zenith. Both are about 30 minutes after I put out the bedside lamp(the Zenith was slightly further away at an angle hence the bezel pointer didn't charge up). Interestingly the different sepia glazes make the lume go from blue white to an eerie green. Which was the original colour glow of radium back in the day. Minus the risks of mutating monsterism. Both were still perfectly readable to my Mark I Human Eyeball at six this morning.

The Seiko stuff is the boss. Especially when you can layer it on much more thickly because the original dials and hands were designed for that. We're talking a mill thick on original examples. They did not spare the horses back then on military type watches, even when they realised the dangers of the stuff. On the MWR forum one lad had an original 40's Panerai and a geiger counter. At six inches, even a foot's distance the alarm was going nuts. A 1940's Japanese Seikosha Pilots watch was even worse. IIRC he sold them on not long after and made a very tidy sum indeed(more than he'd get today).