Nope, were not talking dials made of stone here, nor are we talking drug infused designs, so if that is what you were expecting, well, you might be disappointed… and justly so… considering this page is dedicated to dials on which a stone wheel was used to texture surfaces, it might not be that exiting reading for most folks. For me though, the results of this technique open up many possibilities…
There is a short back story for this topic…
February 2024
A fashion watch acquired inexpensively on Ebay mainly for the movement, a Seagull automatic with power reserve, day and date complications.
I love the case, love the markers and the big date window, but I can’t put up with the fake guilloche or the flat minutes track on the dial… the hands, I might be able to live with…
I wanted to see what the dial would look like if I scribed through the paint on the dial in the depressions of the pressed guilloche, so I spent a half hour under the microscope practicing with a carbide point. Just another experiment… The laser cut, supper shiny Rousseau logo got pealed off, and I did some letter engraving practice in its place…
I like the shiny brass in the guilloche lows much better… the pink on the subdial hands is an improvement as well, but what happened to the hours and minutes hands???? Over all, there is better contrast and a much more human feel to the time gage… should have kept the date window frame!
I’m OK with this transformation, but there is plenty of room for improvement. So no real surprise that this watch finds itself in the Stoned Dial department for further modifications…
December 12, 2025
The stoned dial idea emerged originally from an experiment on a case… “What will it look like if I scar a stainless steel case with very small touches of a high RPM, stone cutoff wheel?” I have a lot of Nino brand cases, so I gave it a shot… I did a quarter of the case, and what a pleasant surprise!! I did the rest of the case with the exception of the area immediately next to the crystal.
The bevel between the face of the case and the side of the case blended in too much, so a few passes with files, oxide paper, and Maas on a stick put a fine shine on those edges. I completely love the effect!!… but it might be better with the roughness being ever so slightly reduced. A bit of polishing brought the high marks to prevalence…
… so I think to myself, “why not the dial as well?” And the first stoned dial came into existence! A brass disk linearly grooved with light touches of a cutoff wheel, the highs polished bright than lightly oxidized with gun bluing solution.
December 22, 2025
Practice makes better, so out come the dials from 2 project watches. One, the Rousseau in the story above, the other, a vintage day/date from the early 1970s…
and the same technique on mother of pearl…
January 2, 2026 (first time I’m dating anything 2026)
Continuing on with the stoned dials, here is a sequential look at the hand engraving of the power reserve indicator track for the Rousseau mod.
There is still a bit of work to be done on this piece, but it already is looking much, much better than its silver original…
January 11, 2026
A bit more work done on the stoned dialed watches this past week…
I decided to experiment a bit further with the dial in the stoned Nino case… I am going to build up a thick coat of laquier on top of the dial, then sand it flat and pollish it – this should give it a texture under glass effect, similar to a GS dial. It is going to be a longish process consisting of many short sessions of topcoat buildup and sandings. The photo shows the dial after 4 coats.
Further work on the day/date dial includes the filling in of indices cutouts with garnet bound in lacquer.
The top half of the photo depicts an unsuccessful method, where the garnet sand was sprinkled onto the lacquer filled indices from the top. This resulted in the embedded garnet over hanging the sharp edges of the cutouts, softening the effect too much for my taste. Sprinkling the garnet from the bottom yielded a much better result, but required a difficult cleanup on the back side of the dial.
Im trying to talk myself into carving a logo for this dial, but I might just leave it as is… Now, what to do about the handset?
January 14, 2026 Happy birthday to me!!!
If I’m going to go through the effort of making a special dial for a watch, that watch better be running right, so I took part of the day today to service the Pforzheimer Uhren-Rohwerke movement in the day/date vintage watch. Not the easiest movement to service… lots of keeper plates on the top, but otherwise pretty normal. Looks like a decent quality movement, 5 extra capstones bringing the jewel count to 23…
A huge mistake! so easy to make if not concentrating 100%… the balance bridge twisted in my tweezers and went on a brief flight only to land on the bench in a tizzy. The hairspring coils ended up bunching and locking in on eachother… though I tried, there was no rescuing this mess. Lucky for me though, I happened to have a spare movement of similar caliber, whose balance was the same as this one (PUW 13xx movements are very common, PUW having, at that time, been the largest German movement manufacturer).
Also reworked the hand set by sanding the hands and coating them with a copper pigment suspended in alcohol. The seconds hand was left chrome, but got a good polishing…
January 19, 2026
Final assembly of the vintage day/date today! I’m really liking it!!!
Also started another experiment to see if I can make a GPF logo for the Rousseau out of carved nacre. Made one out of unbacked MOP and a second out of an already existing MOP dial. For carving purposes, the unbacked MOP (0.4mm thick) was superglued to a wood block. I used a half millimeter diamond burr to carve out the letters… worked out pretty good so far, and I hope to finish them tomorrow.
January 20th, 2026
Continuing on with the nacre logo experiment today, I cut out the brass part of the dial, then polished both logos… But there is not so good news… It looks like the MOP on the brass has cracked due to the stress of the brass being cut. I used the finest saw blades I have (7.0 that,s a fine blade!), but I guess that they’re not fine enough to cut through 0.2mm brass plate without binding up enough to distort it…
And yes, after dissolving the superglue bond by soaking it in acetone, both logos were in pieces… Oh well, its not like I could have used either of them anyway… my dislexia shining through to the point of misspelling my own logo.
I sure did learn some limitations though…
January 22, 2026
More MOP shenanigans today… this stuff is brittle! I’m hoping for a date window border and a decent logo to cover the day indicator holes in the dial…
starting off with sanding a nacre shard down to less than a mm in thickness, drawing out a couple logos (in case one breaks…) and then using a 90deg graver to carve out the letters, and a .8mm drill to drill for the mounting holes.
And of course… with hindsight, I realize that it would have been better to drill the holes before separating the 2 logos. The mother of pearl would have been a much stronger entity…
…and Dan, WAY TOO MUCH PRESSURE ON THE DRILL BIT!!! Remember, go slow… take your time… which is what I did on the date window…
… a little mockup…
January 28, 2026
A fairly big decision reached today regarding the Rousseau Mod… I was planning to replace the day complication with a GPF logo, but I’ve changed my mind. My reasoning for replacing the day complication was that the letters on the day track were tiny – and by tiny, I mean just about 1.5mm in size – and I didn’t have the confidence that I could engrave something that small. Well, I buckled down today, sharpened my smallest graver, and dug into the brass under 40X magnification… I’m a badass, or it might be a lot easier than I thought it would be… either way, it turned out great.
I ended up silvering the stoned dial, the power reserve indicator track and the day track, than snapping and gluing them together. I’m starting to see something a bit more concrete here…
January 30, 2026
Finishing out the details on the Rousseau dial by reinstalling the original rose gold markers…
and refinishing the original hands… stripping them of paint, brushing them down with 2000 grit paper, then gun blueing them to a very dark straw/gold…
and yes, I don’t know why, but I am a sucker for pink…
February 2, 2026
Assembly day!!! And the last time I would have to touch this project if everything were to go well…
Of course, how can everything go well now?!!! The spring lever that advances the date wheel at midnight… well, it’s made out of shit metal that bends instead of springs… and the date does not advance… I’ll have to get brave sometime in the near future, and remake that lever out of a better material…
For now, I’m really liking it enough to set the date with the button every day I wear the watch …