The Art of Dial Making

A watch dial is, in engineering terms, one of the simplest components in a movement. It is a disc — usually brass, occasionally gold or silver — with holes drilled for the hands and feet. Everything that happens before the dial reaches the movement is art, chemistry, and patience.

The blank begins its journey in a stamping press. Brass sheet stock, rolled to precise thickness, is punched into circles. The edges are trued on a lathe. Feet are soldered. Then the disc enters finishing, which is where the craft begins: galvanic treatments to build up metal thickness, lacquering in colours that require multiple fired coats to achieve depth and uniformity, and the sunray finishing that gives a dial its signature light-catching quality.

Sunray brushing — the radiating finish that makes a dial seem to generate its own light — is achieved by holding the dial against a rotating brush while slowly rotating the dial itself on a second axis. Eleven passes at controlled pressure, each one slightly offset. Too much pressure and the finish becomes coarse. Too little, and it washes out. The result, when done correctly, is a surface that seems to change depth as the light moves across it.

Applied indices — the raised hour markers you see on many dress dials — are placed by hand. Each one is attached to a small foot, bent from the same metal as the marker, and pressed into a pre-drilled hole in the dial blank. The tolerances are measured in tenths of a millimetre. A misaligned marker, visible only under magnification in the factory, will become obvious to the wearer after a decade of looking at their wrist. This is why dial makers take as long as they do.