: Such a cliché. ;)

You should never explain a joke and that's a good one, but it probably deserves some explanation.

See, the French term for the blocks used in the pad printing Jeff describes is cliché. The process is a little like manual typesetting, where individual blocks with discrete elements (such as the Heuer shield in this example) are arranged together to form a dial. Blank blocks are used for areas where nothing is to be printed, and they all fit together like a jigsaw.

And a block is used until it shows significant wear - you can actually see that if you can find watches from subsequent batches, the crispness of the early examples giving way to more blurred edges. So, if there is an error with the engraving of the cliché, like the Heuer text being off centre for example, that will feature on every dial printed used that cliché block. The initial set up seems to be quite an expense too, as small discrepancies, as Steve has pointed out here, are often allowed to stand rather than being corrected with a new block at outset.

As the "jigsaw" is a bit different for each model of watch, the Heuer shield block might be a marginally different size on, say, a Camaro compared to a Carrera, which is why you don't often see the "error" across different models.