Hi Steve,

you certainly brought up a very interesting and so far neglected Heuer mystery!

I had a look a my 3647 T, and indeed the "U" (and the whole word HEUER) seems to have slipped a tiny bit to the right within the shield.

In order to investigate a bit further, I used two of the pictures from your initial message for comparison. You might object that the photos have probably not been taken exactly in a right angle towards the dial, and therefore could be distorted. I agree, but I don't think that this does have a significant effect for our purpose.

Then I drew a symmetrical, 5-angled shield (in pink) over the two photos, which shows some interesting effects:

On the Camaro dial, actually the printed shield seems to be the "problem", while the HEUER script is centered very well within the pink symmetrical shield. The printed shield is not symmetrical – the left half is significantly wider than the right half, resulting in the "U" not pointing towards the lower corner of the printed shield.

On the other hand, on the Carrera T dial the printed shield is concurring nicely with the drawn symmetrical shield. But the whole word HEUER is offset slightly to the right (you may also note the wider distance between the left line of the shield and the H, compared with the distance between the R and the right line of the shield).

So there are obviously different reasons for the two "quirks". But I still wonder that – especially on the more obvious Camaro dial – nobody should have noticed it early on, or found it worthwhile to correct it during the production timespan. What I find especially confusing is the fact that the Camaro quirk is consistent on all the different dial variants, which would have required different clichés, anyway...

Cheerio,
Robert

;-)