It feels wrong for me to make a completed project post during such a sensitive time for the community, but I decided that if my post could at least brighten someone's day, it was worth making. So @paccbet, I hope this good news during this tough week makes things a little bit better for you.  People who know me know that I love a weird project. I like to challenge myself and my preconceptions when it comes to modifying watches. So when Paccbet came to me with a picture of this watch, my interest was evidently piqued:  The watch is the Gate/Silix cheapie Airking that everyone knows and loves. The story is that Mr. P somehow managed to wipe the printing straight off. He initially wanted me to try to redo the printing for him, but I gave him a better offer - to totally re-conceptualize the watch. He obliged and sent the watch for me to play with for the next couple of months.  I knew I wanted to do something gilt, but with a dial that had silver indices and hands, I was in for a doozy. I thought about it long and hard, and came up with this plan of attack - Remove the indices and coronet Sand the sunburst from the dial, revealing the brass plate Put on a gilt decal Paint the indices and coronet gold with Testors metallic paint Replace the indices and coronet Reshape the tips of the hands to match the pointed vintage style Sand the hands to the bare brass and polish the surface Relume everything I was a bit worried about the gold painted parts looking "cheap", but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I wanted the watch as a whole to have the sort of over polished, estate sale, grampy's old beat up watch vibe that you see so often when these come up on eBay, and the gold painted indices ended up looking sort of oxidized, so I think it works as a whole. No this isn't gen-spec in any respect, but it was originally a $40 watch, what more can you ask for? I'll be sad to let this one go, but I hope that I made this into a watch that @paccbet can be proud to wear every once in a while.


And of course, for the one and only @McGilli
Thanks for reading