New guy with a new (old) Autavia Bund

Hi there,

please let me introduce myself and my new Autavia Bund:
My name is Andreas and I'm located near Frankfurt, Germany. I've been collecting watches for a few years now, most of them vintage. Usually I'm active in german watch forums, but with my newest achievement, a 73663 Autavia Bund, I need some help from the international community.



The watch is beautiful and has a perfect case, movement and dial. But these hands...
Most pictures of this watch type in the internet do show these replacement hands: The yellow lume simply does not fit with the green lume of the painted numbers.
I've given up the idea to find hands with a matching colour, so I decided to have them re-lumed by a specialist watch maker. But the current hands show a very good quality which would make it a waste to use these for re-luming.
I wonder if anyone has an idea where to find matching hands for this type. Best would be a poor lume which would need a re-luming anyway.

Thanks a lot in advance for any hint.

Regards
Andreas

Welcome to the forum, beautiful watch!

I see what you mean by the yellow hands, should be more like this color.


You could try Abel Court at HeuerTime.com, he might be able to help you source proper hands. The hands don't look that bad to me, but if the color bothers you, a re-lume seems like a good second option.

Thank you, guys.

Indeed, that's exactly the colour combination for hands and numbers I'm looking for.
Will get in contact with Abel.

Very considerate of you to offer a trade for your perfectly fine hands on this one. It would be a shame to lose the originality forever, but if nobody steps up it's certainly your call here. Very nice watch btw!

That's the dilemma: Neither the current situation with service hands is original nor a solution with re-lumed hands will be.

Abel was able to help me, but in another way than expected: The dials were produced by an external company and Heuer simply used the hands they had, the ones with a yellow lume.
So the green lume hands are the wrong ones and the yellow lume hands are original. That explains why the green ones are such a minority.

One final update: The non original, domed plexi has been replaced with an aftermarket plexi from Abel. Once he made me aware of the nice, but wrong plexi it could not be made unseen...
By now I'm pretty happy with the originality of the watch 😁

What's the difference in plexi crystals?

I'm sure Abel's must be closer to the vintage original, but not sure what was wrong with your old one.

As you can see better in this picture, the rounding causes a slight gap between bezel and plexi.




For comparison reasons, here's a picture from Abel's homepage as my watch is stored at the bank at the moment. I hope that does not violate the forum rules.

The glas has higher flanks which transforms the watch a lot.