Time to lume some hands and dials!

For this tutorial, you’ll need:

  1. The DIY Watch Club Luming Kit

  2. Thinner (optional). For how to pick the right thinner, please see the guide below.

Which thinner to get

The many types of thinner can be confusing. Here’s a quick guide on it:

  • We want lacquer thinner. Based on the region you live in, it might have a different name, but technically we want thinner that is designed for thinning nitrocellulose-based lacquer or paint.

  • Paint thinner, mineral spirit, white spirit, mineral turpentine, which are different names for largely the same thing, do not work.

  • If you are into model painting, thinner for nitrocellulose-based paint, commonly known as lacquer paint, works fine. Avoid thinner for acrylic paint, enamel paint, and oil paint.

You might find variants of lacquer thinner offering different duration to dry. They are usually categorized as “fast acting”, “normal”, or “slow dry”, or with other similar terms. Slow dry thinner (which is also known as a “leveling thinner” in model paints term) would be helpful if you want more time to work with the lume compound, but it’ll slow down the drying process. For our purposes, normal lacquer thinner is fine.

Before starting, a few safety precautions:

  1. do this in a well ventilated area, as solvent is involved

  2. clear out all fire sources and inflammable objects

Let’s get started

The following video guide will teach you two methods of preparing the lume compound and the proper way to apply lume on hands and dials. Due to the complexity of process, we advise you to go through the video in its entirety at least once first, and then following along the video and attempting your luming process.

Flame blue hands pairs well with some freshly applied lume compound. If you have a flame blue kit, consider flame bluing a set of hands before apply lume to them. The flame blue tutorial is linked below.

Quick Guide on the Electronic Scale

Here is how to use the electronic scale in the kit:

  1. Turn on the scale with the leftmost button.

  2. Press the M button to cycle through the unit of weight and choose mg (milligram) as the unit. If you accidently turned on quantity mode, which is not needed for this tutorial, you can press the M button once to go back to the normal mode.

  3. Set the container onto the scale, press the T button to set the reading to zero. You can now begin to weight to ingredients.

Luming Guide

In this video guide, we will introduce two methods of preparing the lume compound. Therefore, please go through the entire video once first to soak up the process before attempting to do it yourself.

Optional: Flame blue hands

Flame blue hands pair well with lume. If you want a set of lumed flame blue hands, you should flame blue the hands first before you apply lume to them. You can access the tutorial below:

You’re done!

Now you can take your newly lumed hands and dial and hand and return to the watch assembly tutorials to assemble your watch!