Replicas watches are not perfect, even the ones made by the famous factories, while customers need perfect ones, so some factories in the market will produce watch parts to make up for specific defects on these replicas. The famous makers that produce these watch parts include SW, Buff, Deep, etc. Maybe SW is the one you often hear, it usually appears with Patek Philippe Nautilus 5711 and Aquanaut 5167. In the past, I made an introduction of replacing the dial, hands and date on 3K Factory Nautilus 5711 with SW dial, hands and date, it attracted a lot of readers, today, I will share the same work done on another replica, which is an Aquanaut 5167 made by 3K Factory.
Why choose 3K 5167 Aquanaut to do this?
We know super clones of Patek Aquanaut are mainly made by Z Factory and 3K, Z Factory claims they use clone 330 movement, which is actually modified on basis of a Miyota calibre, 3K uses a real super clone movement, which was PP324 before, and now is PP330. This movement guarantees the case has the closest thickness to that of genuine watch, so this is the reaon to choose this watch from 3K.
There is also the same work can be done on other watches, for example, people get Rolex Datejust replicas from VS Factory, then replace its dial with genuine watch dial, because VS has the best Dandong 3235 movement. The GMT-Master from Clean is usually used by some dealers to install with a meteorite dial because Clean has the best clone 3285 movement.
What improvements have been made on the SW dial, hands and date?
Here are come comparison pictures below, the left Aquanaut is originally made by 3K, the right one has been replaced with SW dial, hands and date wheel. I can not find too much difference, certainly, the date font becomes thicker. Some guys may say the lume applied on the hands and hour markers on the left watch look light green, and on the right watch, it looks white, this is an issue on previous editions, as far as I know, 3K Factory has fixed this issue on their latest V3 edition. Does the dial color look different? Does anybody think the right SW dial look more like real watch? Some people said it is more gray. Genuine watch also looks gray, not black.
Is it necessary to replace with a SW dial?
That depends on you. One set of SW dial, hands and date wheel is not cheap, after fixing the color issue of the lume material, the Aquanaut 5167 from 3K is very good enough. By the way, if you have decided to buy this extra service from your dealer, please ask him to install the date wheel correctly, to make sure the date font is perfectly aligned to the center, because I have seen some examples of Nautilus 5711 and Aquanaut 5167 with blocked date font edge after being installed with a SW date wheel.
The photos of Aquanaut from 3K Factory:
