The dial is the face of a watch. Good and bad are naturally clear at a glance. In the hundreds of years of watch development, various style designs and production techniques have naturally derived. It is the same as the hands and is the most observed by the wearer. Components, so there is no room for sloppy in the process of design and contrived. Different designs and production processes will give people different sensory enjoyment, and a little flaw will leave the wearer with a long-term bad wearing experience, so the rigor required in the process of making the entire dial is naturally quite high. A finished dial needs the cooperation of several factories to complete. Now I will describe the production process of a dial in detail:
Blank factory, copper plate (or special material), die factory (logo die and index die), painting, UP factory, luminous, QC, etc.
Take a dial example we made: gunmetal sunray dial with indexes
1. Metal processing
The first step is to cut the material. There are copper plates specially used to make literals. The thickness of the copper plates are 20c, 40c, and 80c (1c=0.01mm). The commonly used thickness is 40c. Buy the copper plate of the corresponding thickness, and place the material on the die takes the shape by being struck with a punch
Finished the shape and then punch (middle hole, index hole and logo hole).
After drilling the hole, you need to grind the front and further flatten the front side and paste the protective paper welding cover corners (the two corners behind are used to fix the movement)
2. Shading
Shading means that the texture is processed on the polished copper plate, and different shading effects are processed according to the different processes of the literal.
Commonly used shading process: brush, sand blasting
Brush patterns also include: dry brush, water brush (water brush is divided into coarse brush and fine brush), Satin round brush, straight patterns, cloth patterns, random patterns, snow patterns, etc.
Sand blasting: No. 0 sand, 600, 800, 1200, etc.
A watch dial process starts from the shading and is processed according to the needs. For example, the common oil injection literal is sandblasting, which requires different sand thicknesses. As shown below.
The dial of the sunray is carried out by a water brush. According to the effect, the rough brush is performed first, and then the fine brush (the style requires the sunray to be rougher and not fine brush).
3. Plating
Plating is the process of coloring the copper sheet. Before plating, the copper sheet is cleaned with ultrasonic equipment. According to the cost, the dial color is plated in different colors.
Color classification: black, gunmetal, black, blue, gold, rose gold (generally the plating color can meet the color requirements of the finished product, and no oil-painted treatment is required)
4. Oil-painted
Dial oil-painted generally has special requirements (such as gradation effect, which is controlled by the amount of oil-painted) or the oil-painted process where the plating color cannot reach, and dark colors are mostly.
Oil-painted effect atmosphere: light, matte, semi-gloss and semi-matte.
QC is required after oil-painted.
5. silk-screen printing and pad printing
silk-screen printing and pad printing are both ways of printing scales or logos. The printing effect of pad printing is relatively high-end and more three-dimensional. But some printing effects must be completed by silk screen printing, such as printing luminous.
silk-screen printing is manual operation:
Pad printing is a semi-automatic equipment:
The projector is projected to observe whether it is aligned after the graduation line is printed, and the subsequent binding and other processes must be projected. The allowable deviation of printing is 3-5c, and the range is invisible to the naked eye.
6. Install the index
Index are generally divided into real index (which can be made with a height of 40c, which has a good three-dimensional effect) and up (up is a metal sheet, generally about 10c, and the three-dimensional effect is poor)
Emphasize that the index installation is the most difficult and important link in the whole dial, and the craftsmanship requirements are the highest. For example, my type index require the luminous light to be as flat as the type index, and the rectangular type index should be as clear as possible. The process flow first makes the index, and then in the batch plane. In plating (the plating requirements should not be too thin, and the plating should not be too thick with chamfers) filling in the luminous is the most difficult requirement, and the index should be filled for many times, and the luminous intensity of the luminous should be ensured. At the same time, the filling effect must be ensured.
7. QC
All procedures are inspected without any problems.
The above is just an example of a relatively common dial. Some special requirements have different dial craftsmanship, such as marble dial, Damascus dial, and meteorite dial of special materials.
Hello, im noob 🙂