The dial is often considered the “face” of a watch—just as we tend to judge a person by their face, we often evaluate a watch by its dial. But what about the back of the watch? It’s much more than just the “back.” The case back typically features intricate engravings, patterns, or inscriptions. So, what are the common techniques used to process and decorate a watch’s case back?
Laser Marking
Also known as fiber laser marking, this is one of the most commonly used identification processing techniques in our daily lives, aside from various printing processes. It is often used on the surfaces of wood and metal materials. It has a fast processing speed, is convenient, and has a low cost. However, the disadvantage is that the depth of the characters is not sufficient, and over time, the imprints will fade. It is commonly used in some low-end watches.
Hydraulic Molding of Watch Blanks
This technique can produce patterns with the best and fullest three-dimensional effect. It requires a hydraulic mold of the pattern. The blank is heated and then pressed with a hydraulic press to create a three-dimensional texture. Therefore, the production cycle is relatively long. The drawback is that very fine patterns cannot be processed using this technique because the mold cannot withstand such high pressure for extremely fine details.
These different processing techniques for the characters and patterns on the back cover of a watch each have their own characteristics and are suitable for different types of watches and production requirements. Whether it’s the high-efficiency and cost-effective laser marking or the high-quality but more time-consuming hydraulic molding, they all contribute to the diversity and uniqueness of watch designs.
Etching process
It is a technology for fine processing of patterns and texts on the surface of hardware materials, which is widely used in many industries, such as wristwatches. It is generally used for the processing of patterns and texts on the back cover of watches, dials, bracelets and other parts, such as the etching of brand logos, model numbers, serial numbers and so on, to increase the aesthetics and personalization of the products.
Hardware etching process is to selectively corrode the surface of hardware materials by chemical or electrochemical methods, so as to form the desired pattern or text. Usually a layer of resist film is coated on the surface of the hardware, and then the resist film is removed through photolithography, silkscreen printing and other processes, leaving the metal bare, and then immersed into the etching solution. The bare metal is corroded and dissolved by the etching solution, while the part protected by the resist film is retained, resulting in the etching pattern.
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