In over the past 10 years I have painted 100s of vintage watch hands and thought I would share some of the details of doing this here. Its not that hard if a few important steps are followed. First I will start with some before pics of the hands as I received them. Looks like they were hand painted with the hands on the watch as some of the paint got on the dial and it does not want to come off completely with any of the dial cleaners that I have....

First I remove the hands and soak them in lacquer thinner for an hour or two to remove the old paint. Then I place the hour and minute hands under water to remove the old lume (I do not want any old lume dust around even if it is the newer type).
Next, the hands need to be sanded with 600 grit paper. I have used some other hands to illustrate this (I had already painted the Heuer hands when I realized I should have taken a pic of the sanding op). The hour and minute hands can be held with tweezers but I use a reaming tool to hold the small hands and put the long end on my thumb nail to support it while sanding.....


Most hands were not sanding originally when painted at the factory and that is the main reason the paint flakes or chips off. Its also a good idea to use a paint prep solvent to make sure there is no oil on them before painting. For painting I mount the small hands on straight pins that have been sharpened on the ends so the will fit and fit tight (so they don't blow off from the paint spray). For the hour and minute hands, I use wooden match sticks that are trimmed on the end so the hands will fit. These match sticks are then fitted on additional straight pins. I use an off white spray enamel (Ford Wimbledon white to be exact) for the small hands. They need 2 coats and in this case, the white is used as a base coat for the orange hands with 2 coats of orange after the white. The most important thing is to spray the first coat just enough to cover, let it get tacky (NOT dry) and then spray the second coat (something I learned working in an auto body shop in another lifetime).....


The hands need to dry overnight before handling. Next comes the lume. I use regular scotch tape on the front of the hand to hold the lume in place. The lume that I use is my own special blend and it is water based so I can add color of need be (don't ask because I do not want to give away a lot of work that went into it). For these hands, I want a vintage look instead of a bright white look aka Superluminova which is solvent based and hard to work with....

this material needs to dry for at least an hour before carefully removing the tape. Here are the finished hands and on the dial too....


and in the finished watch....


Well, that's it. Is not hard but might take a bit of practice to get it just right. I think the hands make the watch. What do you think? Thanks, Craig