I've picked up a new hobby of collecting watches to seem like an interesting person. Whilst I don't have the salary to collect big fancy brands like your Rolexes and APs, I do have the patience to scour eBay and markets to find cool trinkets.
A while back I found a post on Reddit where a person modded one of the classic watches, a Casio MQ-24, here. It's a modded watch with a blank face with glow in the dark paint sprayed on it.
Much like its digital relative, the F-91, it's an affordable, slim watch where its minimalism and simplicity stands out. With it being so cheap has opened it to being modded as it's not the end of the world if it breaks. Which is why I wanted to have a go at it.
Taking off the back case is straight forward with a thin flat screwdriver. Removing the rubber ring and plastic housing reveals the quartz movement.
Removing the stem is probably the hardest part about this mod if you have no clue on how to take apart a watch as there's a small hole you need to find and insert a thin pin-like rod to remove the stem. See if you can spot it in the picture above, courtesy of the great macro lens on my phone :)
Spoiler alert (Click me!)
It's the black hole directly below the greyish nib in the center of the picture.
Once the stem and crown have been removed, you can access the watch face. Now instructions aren't entirely clear on how to remove the ink markings and whether you want to remove the watch hands but the way I did it was to use isopropyl alcohol and not remove the watch hands as I don't have the tools to put the hands back on again.
This part is not hard, just boring as you constantly have to wipe in a circular motion to get the markings off. It seems obvious in hindsight but I've had better luck using rough kitchen roll as it's more abrasive and gets the ink off as opposed to using smooth napkins.
Now if you want, you can put the watch back together again and it looks pretty sweet as it is. If you want to go all out you can buy lume paint (get the really fine stuff) and then paint the face with multiple layers to get a good coating of it on the face to get a strong effect.
Here is the final product, using the lume adds a nice 'wrapped paper' texture effect during the daylight which I quite enjoy.