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The good thing is with the internet is that you sometime meet with good fairies. One of my fairy is Niall who gave me a bunch of SWCS NEWS and leaflets/ catalogs etc for free of charge again. I got no time to go trough the whole lot but in the Watch and Clock collection leaflet made for years 1988/89 I found a letter/offer which does list the name of the ppl in the management so now I finally can try to find one of those ppl who worked for SWCS. My initial google search was not successful though. If you have any idea how to find them please let me know. And then it seems that US Radium apart from poisoning ladies also made rare earth special phosphors for CRTs. Shall I wash my hands now?

I recently retired and decided to re-start the watchmaking hobby I gave up 40 years ago. Having blown the dust off my old lathe and tools, pulled out my large box of movements, parts etc including a box of a dozen or so watches I kept seperate because they triggered my radiation detector, Radium yuck, I decided to look at some forums. There are many but not all are friendly to all, in particular there is a lot of snobbery towards youngster newbie's, yet they are the very people the industry needs as experience watchmakers are retiring or visiting the big cannon pinion in the sky and not being replaced in sufficient numbers. This forum stood out as being friendly to all, in particular the younger newbies that are desperately needed to keep the profession ticking. So how could I not join I have 40 years of dust to blow away.

That case is great for anyone whose afraid of radium dials.

We live in a radioactive world. It is all around you. Holding a dial against your skin will not give you a radiation burn. It won’t send you into the hospital. A single CT scan will give you a dose of 10-30 mSV. Just eating a banana will expose you to 0.1 uSV. The typical US resident receives 3 mSv a year from natural background radiation. In places like Kerala in India, they receive a natural background dose of 30 mSV a year (half from Radon and half from gamma emissions). There are no observed health effects in the population. One study estimated a dose from wearing a wristwatch with a 1 uCi radium dial worn 16 hours a day as 14 mSv a year. Smoking 20 cigarettes a day gives you a dose of 53 mSV.

This is kind of what I was hoping to hear. Thanks, it's just hard not to be at least a little panicked when half of the crowed says I've sealed my coffin and the other half says I am okay. On this forum I saw a picture of a dude holding a watch movement with the dial attached out of its case and the dial had that old school (defiantly radium) numbered indices. He even flipped the movement around so the dial was touching his skin! This guy acted like it was no problem. This was extremely confusing for me to see as we had this entire conversation above.

It's true, it could well be radium. I believe Omega switched from radium to tritium (half life: 12.3 years) in 1962. This watch dates to '62, so I will be cautious. It is crumbling anyway, so it has to go. I will leave the dots on the dial untouched.

By using the phrase 'half-lives', I assume that it is radium? If so, the half life is 1600 years, so it will still be very active. It can be removed safely with the hands in water. It looks like there may also be dots of lume on the hour markers.

There is nothing to worry about. If you did all that cleaning there is probably no radium left. Even if some did fall off somewhere you didn't get to, the amount of radon gas it would produce would almost certainly be negligible. If it would put your mind at ease, you could get one of those radon gas test kits. However, with the small amounts of radium you were dealing with, I really don't think it is necessary.

a month of a panic attack you should get some professional help. It's not good for your health Depending upon where you live I have a website. The website has everything You need to know about radon in other words you get a test kit or seek out a professional to help you out. I'm guessing anything they have to detect radon would probably find the radium. https://www.epa.gov/radon Then what you really need to do is purchase yourself a really sensitive Geiger counter. This way can check all the places that you're worried about and for the future you can check any of the watches You might be considering purchasing conceivably if it's sensitive enough you might not even have to open up your eBay packaging could just send it back.

Updating on the situation: Despite all of the information I basically suffered a month long anxiety attack. Since then I have sold both of my suspect radium watches to collectors on Ebay, vacuumed my room multiple times, cleaned my tweezers, and dusted my desk and watchmaking mat. Still I find me self rather uneasy to even sleep in my room, and to tell you the truth I don't even know if I was working with radium this entire time. The 6 watches I suspect are radium might have been tritium, although I highly doubt that at least not one of them was radium. The radon gas aspect just has me a little queasy still. Could any lume have fallen off without my knowing? Maybe under my desk, or in a drawer? Emitting radon gas as I speak? Is it even enough to be dangerous? Or am I freaking out for absolutely no reason? It just seems as though one side of the equation tells me to be afraid and the other says I have nothing to worry about. I am not trying to vent my anxieties to a watchmaking forum, I am just telling you guys my experience and for any hobbyist that has my similar worries to not feel alone. Not sure if any of you guys can elaborate on this or not. I just figured I should let you all, or any future viewer know how it was going. P.S. I am genuinely sorry if I sound manic or insane haha

Hi welcome to the forum, pity the watch is kaput, in what way is it broken. There does not look like there is any worry over radium on that watch. The one that have luminous compounds from the 30s 40s 50s probably do contain radium in the paint. Normal precautions taken as a matter of course, ie if the compound is flaking off and bits can be seen on the dial wear a mask and gloves to avoid inhaling or touching the material and if you are removing it for re luming do it in a bag and discard the contents safely. Modern watches do not use radium. Have you a picture of the movement as it looks a classic face and 9ct gold case

Thanks guys a ton for your replies. I've been really anxious about watch making recently not gonna lie lmao. When it comes to safety of course. First radium scares, and then I started to rethink my cleaning methods and disposing methods for my L&R cleaning solutions. (Considering they are absolutely not the safest of household chemicals). By the way. I use two rinses because that is at least how the pros do it? No? My watch making heroes all use two rinses too be as thorough as possible when dissolving the cleaning solution. (As it can leave a sticky residue). That's why I at least use one cleaning solution, then put my parts in two separate rinses. If you guys really think its not necessary then I will probably stop doing that. As it's kind of a pain to tell you the truth haha.

It is paint, but I am not afraid of radium.

Is that paint or radium on the hands? If it's radium, there's a lot of it. Stand back !

The only radium watch I keep (1940's Universal Geneve) records about 0.9 micro Sv/h at the crystal, but this drops to background just a few inches away. Aware of the Radon danger, I keep it in an airtight plastic bag, and open it outside. (Not sure if the radon can get through plastic bags?)

Radiation (although a more serious situation) is a bit like lubrication in that there can be many opinions along a spectrum with no true right answer. On one hand there is no absolute "safe" level of radiation exposure, but on the other hand a risk/benefit analysis can be done so as not to simply turn our backs on anything involving radiation that has benefits for our lives. (Sorry if that came out preachy!) In industry and medicine, when we need to work with radiation the guiding concept for exposure is "ALARA" which stands for As Low As Reasonably Achievable. The tools to accomplish this are Time, Distance and Shielding. So for those that want to minimize their exposure to the (sometimes quite significant) radiation coming from old lumed hands and dials, those concepts can be used. Keeping it outside of your body is the first concern (there would then be zero distance) so masks, gloves, disposable plastic drapes, etc. are useful as mentioned in posts above. Keeping things damp can minimize contaminated dust generation, so if you are sanding or scraping off old lume, keep the tools and parts wet. But even then, there is radiation being emanated from lume even in a closed watch or a sealed bag of hands, so precautions shouldn't stop there. Doing things quickly, and maybe not using your "hottest" vintage watch as a daily wear item can leverage the time aspect. Thought of in this way, you can find other ways to avoid prolonged exposure, such as not storing your stash of old hands in the drawer right below the working surface you spend hours hovering over. I do think it's a good idea for everyone working in this area to have one of the inexpensive radiation meters - you can't balance the risks if you don't know the relative magnitude of what you are working with. There is another wrinkle - Radon (a radioactive gas) is generated as radium decays, and one study found that a collection of a dozen or so radioactive watches in a poorly ventilated area could lead to elevated radon levels, so how and where you store hot materials can also take that into consideration.

It would be nice to hear from someone who has been trained to work with radioactive materials to comment on how to handle radium watches. We need to find a friendly nuclear engineer. Anyone know one?

A lot of the danger is blown out of proportion as people panic when they hear "radiation". Not realising that even bananas (and us) are radioactive to some degree. The bottom line is, you are probably safe unless you ingest some radium - which you definitely don't want. The body treats it as calcium and deposits it in bone, where it will stay for the rest of you life, emitting alpha, beta, gamma particles. Alpha particles are the most damaging inside the body (Litvinenko was killed by an alpha emitter). That's why, when working on radium dials and hands, I wear a mask and gloves, use cling film on the work surface, and use water to remove any radium.

How what we apply a different rule here? An observation that I've made has been when you find somebody this concerned are upset with something then usually that's going to be bad for them. It probably won't be bad for the rest of us but you probably will die from cancer from radiation exposure. It's just your destiny so knowing that it's your destiny don't play with them. I just noticed over the years of my life that things that people get upset about are the things that plagued them in life so this is going to be your thing then get your Geiger counter and stay away from them. Then while you're at it takers sensitive Geiger counter and look at the videos on that channel of all the other stuff is radioactive some of that vintage glass that you might have in the kitchen or certain ceramics that have certain colors on them East shows a ceramic tile but in one of his videos in the antique story was running around in there all kinds of things are radioactive. Then a course you go back farther and they're all kinds a silly people at thought radioactive stuff was good for you all sorts of Healthy remedies of that new angle radium stuff. Then unfortunately there's another YouTube channel or two that I subscribed to that talks about disasters and is back in water disasters of and it's not from radium watch hands. Usually some of the biggest disasters involves medical stuff either by accidental computer programming or the real big one is medical waste ending up in places where they don't grasp what the pretty powder is inside spread all over the place. There has been several really sizable disasters of that because the other problem of course is you can't see it So the rule is if it's going to bother you get rid of it.

are you saying that we all react equally to radium ?. Interesting . Lol no the gorgeous husky is having a crazy moment, eyes open and teeth showing. . I may be wierd at times but why would i have a photo of a dead husky for a profile picture .

Thinking of YouTube videos did you watch the video is at the link I gave up above? I was curious and watched his last video on detectors and revealed what I suspected a lot of the inexpensive ones you find on Amazon or eBay are not quite worthless but almost worthless. You need a detector with a better sense or otherwise you're not going to pick up all the stuff you really want to pick up Oh and here's an interesting company. The Accucell watch hands the listed under Geiger counter accessories. We'll see they have Geiger counter kits unknown if they're very good. I'm suspicious of anything that has a metal tube because the metal tube is going to filter out things. For instance my two bits on my machine has I think it's Micah in the front it's a very thin something that's not metal that makes it very sensitive. So they have anything resembling metal it's for it has to be much stronger. Even in the review video at the YouTube link above he has a detector that was two-part Sydney pointed out it had a more higher radiation detector and he takes the back off and sure enough the metal tube. So basically by the time that part of the detector would be unhappy well you'd be unhappy in your future also but the website they do have things to pick up just in case you don't have any radium hands as they have a few of those for sale and other things of the radioactive https://theelectronicgoldmine.com/ That reminds me of an interesting story. The national Association of watch and clock collectors as regional meetings all across the country. Somewhere in I don't know if as a regional meeting or a national meeting somebody came in to the meeting and claim they were from the Atomic Energy Commission and they had a Geiger counter and they were going to confiscate everything that was radioactive at least that was the story I was told in and basically everything that had radium was under the table after that. I think somebody thought it was basically just a clever scam to pick up harmful evil radioactive items like Rolex watches they have a lot of well some of them do of course the amusement with the story is if you have one of the sensitive detectors hiding your radium stuff under the table isn't going to do the a lot a good. What's really fun for risk is if I can remember what I did with my bag of military timepiece hands I don't remember how many I have in a bag but Quite a few and that's where my detector will pick that up several feet away ill start picking up whatever it's radiating which is why usually I try to remember to put that someplace else in the house the same as the aircraft clock dials there somewhere else in the house and I thought normally all the radioactive hands were someplace else like in the attic Far away.

Sorry N-E-W, I was called away to dinner. What I was going on to say is that the radiation sensitivity to animals including humans (the LD50/30 - 50% die within 30 days) is species dependent (elephants are more sensitive than humans) but does not depend upon the genetic makeup of the animal. We can all safely wear radium watches whatever the condition of our hearts. btw did the dog die?

After fixing them up (before I knew they were radium) I sold them all. Lol. maybe next time

To be absolutely safe, send me your radium watches and I will bear the risk.

I know radium doesn't seem to be a huge problem from the watchmakers perspective. Again seeming that you don't breath it in or anything. However I think its always good to know so you can at least feel a little more inclined to handle with care. Especially when reluming old watch hands. I didn't get into watchmaking to deal with radioactive material. I got into watchmaking because I love the puzzling idea of putting all of these gears and wheels apart and putting them back together again. Reviving old watches especially since I work on vintage most of the time. There seems to be two opposing and completely contrasting sides to these arguments: Iv seen people swear that radium watches are not worth the risk of working on them and Iv seen others say its harmless. I like to err on the side of caution when it comes to these things. I know what your saying John. A lot of things are radioactive to some degree, and funny enough when my Geiger counter came in I did look at everything I had lol. Just to experiment a little. I mean what if some radium got onto my tools? My floor? My bench? I guess I do tend to overthink these types of things, and radium watches certainly got me anxious when I learned how "dangerous" they could be. I started seeing comments on watch repair related YouTube videos talking about how the repairer should be worried about the radium in the air when they were reluming hands. Then I spiraled down to a panic. Just thought I'd add. These are really cool little boxes you. I didn't know they had radium reluming kits. Interesting