
A while ago I bought a couple of donor watches with replica 6498 movements. I wanted to try my hand at a larger dial build and the gorgeous looking hand wound movements really appealed to me, even though the 44mm case sizes meant I could not wear them.
I came up with a dial design that has both pilot and California dial influences. I tried to keep it clean and to accentuate the large negative spaces on this dish of a dial which came in at 38.8mm. For this reason I left out the minute markers and I think it makes a bold statement despite going against the nature of a pilot watch.
Most dials I design go through a few variations, even where there are no big changes I end up tweaking for proportions. With this dial I made 3 samples and there were around 10 different vector versions. It might not sound like a lot but it’s all time consuming, especially making the samples and testing them in cases.
I tested the dial with a slashed zero going in the opposite direction but was shot down by the couple of people I showed it to… Might revisit that in a different dial at some point.