The Story of the Dial

High end quality watches with reasonable prices – quite a challenge already, but Zitura wanted some-thing more, something unique, something to stand out. That is why Zitura contacted one of the five worldwide leading institutes of precious metal technology located in Switzerland and developed together with their research department a special dial. The challenge was to integrate the existing idea of a gold bar with a purity of 999.9 pure 24K along with a new and yet timeless design, that no one would be able to imitate. Did we make you curious? We will try to sketch for you the making of this peculiar dial. It is in the foundry department of Argor-Heraeus, Switzerland, in Mendrisio near the Italian border where the story of the Zitura Gold Dial begins. First of all the solid pure gold that will be used for the dial, needs to be transformed into a preliminary form that can be processed by the mechanical department. The gold is thus melted in the furnace of a continuous casting unit, from which the gold strand is pulled over a profile mold. The result is a thick golden stripe with a shape that can be easily handled. The thick strip of gold is then transferred to the mechanical department where it is rolled into gold bands of exact thickness. The rolling procedure happens in two stages: the first one where the band is roughly rolled to the necessary thickness and a fine- tuning passage, where the raw edges are eliminated and the gold band is cropped into the right size for the blanks to be cut out. At this stage, in order to bring the metal surface into the exact crystalline condition that is necessary for later minting, the blanks are annealed in a continuous furnace with temperatures around 600 -700 °C. Now comes the cleaning. First the surface is smoothed through ball burnishing. Dirt and fat remainders are then removed by means of different solvents in an ultrasonic procedure. Finally the blank of the future Zitura dial gets to the actual minting stage. Here the dial receives its actual look by means of pressures from 15 to 225 t per stamping procedure. At this point the final and most intricate passage of the Zitura dial making takes place and sets this dial apart from any other gold bullion dial in the market: the minting of the Zitura logo in form of an iridor®. The Swiss precious metals institute Argor-Heraeus has developed together with OVD Kinegram Corp. a special technique to apply high-tech optical devices directly into the surface of minted gold. iridor® products, exclusively produced by Argor-Heraeus, are the only gold items in the world to incorporate the unique and world-wide patented technology of OVD Kinegram Corp., who is universally known for its security applications on bank notes and government documents. Thanks to its high resolution graphics, the nanotext (micro writing with exceptional clarity) and its dynamic effect iridor® products are clearly different from promotional holograms. But there is also an other reason for using this highly sophisticated technology on precious metals: the sheer beauty of its iridescence. The combination of invisibly small elementary areas of micro profiles on pure gold, interacting with the dancing light is something that no photograph can portray appropriately: you just have to see it. And you’ll know at once – this is a Zitura watch.