Everything You Need to Know About Your Timepiece’s Parts

More and more people are turning into timepiece enthusiasts, especially when you can mod your own watch and turn them into new pieces. However, customizing your watch can be tricky if you’re not familiar with its different parts. 

It is known that the primary role of a watch is to help the user tell the time, and the dial or face is the system that gives you just that. Although these dials and faces will have their own design and style, they all follow a globally accepted system that will provide an organized system to tell time. 

Seiko offers mod parts to help enhance the aesthetic of your timepiece. However, it can be a bit tricky to mod your watch if you’re not familiar with its whole system. You need to break down your watch to understand its parts and see how each of them is an instrument to your entire timepiece.

Watch Dial and Faces

Your watch’s dial and face can be broken down into further categories so you can understand its functions:

• Plan: This is usually a flat color and would have a different material finish, like shiny or matte. But the most popular plan dial is the plan that is painted or has an enameled metal disk.
  
• Textured/Patterned: This type of textured dial has been around for years, and some of the most popular patterns include the Guilloche, Linen, Marquetry, Tapisserie, or Teaked.
  
• Skeletonized: This type of dial shows holes to display your watch’s machinery. Its simplest style is the “open heart,” which shows your watch’s beating.
  
• Unique: Unique dials are often made with precious material or have some hand-crafted art incorporated on their surface.

Watch Hands

Watch Hands are one of the most important parts of your watch since it indicates the passing of time. With that, they need to be placed accurately so you can tell time correctly.

Indices

Indices are the markings you find in your dial, and they come in different styles. These markers would represent the still hours and would often come in different designs and prints. 

In some watches, you’ll find that they’ll have two indices, where two disks are stuck together, and a luminous paint will shine through these sandwich dials to form markings. Finally, there are also 3D dials used to create indices as well.

The Bezel

A popular Seiko mod part for watches is the bezel. This is simply the rim of the watch cover and comes in two distinct styles: plain and informational. Typically, plain bezels have metal rings that protect the watch’s crystal and can be jeweled or decorated. On the other hand, informational bezels come in different designs, like diving watch bezel or count-up bezel. 

The Crown

Crowns can help you set your watch and include other parts like buttons, touch sensors, and even rotating bezels. On manual timepieces, the most common watches have simple knobs that pull out the hands and date complications. Additionally, a crown will also have a screw-down, often found on dive watches that help boost water resistance. 

Outliers

Some watches have outlier styles similar to sundials or one-handed watches, as well as 24-hour dials. Single-hand dials are meant to simplify the time by eliminating clutter as it rotates around a 12-hour dial. 

The Bottom Line: Understand Your Watch so You Can Reinvent It

Though watches are meant to help tell time, there’s no denying that watch enthusiasts want to up their timepiece’s aesthetics by playing around with their parts. But to successfully mod your watch, you need to be familiar with your timepiece’s intricacies so you can choose the right mod parts best suited to your taste.

How Can Crystaltimes USA Help You?

Crystaltimes USA is the go-to specialist of watch enthusiasts. We carry high-quality Seiko Sapphire Crystals, as well as cases, case backs, bezels, bezel inserts, chapter rings, crowns, movements, dials, and other Seiko mod parts. Check out our selection today!