Is your Casio watch too wordy? Erase some text!

ARTICLE – If you are a Casio watch owner and would like to remove unnecessary text from your watch bezel, there is a foolproof, easy way to do it. It just takes a $5.00 cleaning product, a swab, and 10 minutes of time. I didn’t remove every word on the watch, just the ones I think are unnecessary. And this process is obviously limited to the outer surface of the watch. Getting words off the inside of the crystal is another animal.

Thanks to a helpful member of the WatchUSeek forum I was led to a quick and easy means of clearing off the word-busy bezels of three of my Casio watches. I’ll describe the process here and show you how mine turned out.

Casio has traditionally embellished the bezels of many / most of their watch faces with unnecessary wording like ‘Illuminator’, ‘Water Resist’, ‘World Time’, ‘Five Alarms’, and ‘10 year battery’. To many, that extraneous verbiage cheapens the look of the watch.

The joke among watch modification enthusiasts (oh yes, that’s a definite thing) is, if you remove those words, you’ll need to put an appointment in your calendar for 10 years in advance, you’ll forget your watch lights up in the dark and you might not wake up on time in the morning.

I consider such text appropriate for the watch’s box but not on the device’s bezel. I don’t need those reminders with every glance at the time, so I found a great way to get rid of them, and I really like the effect.

I picked up a negative screen version of the popular and inexpensive Casio W218H, specifically the W218H-1BVCF. The watch is under $17 at Amazon. I’ve always wanted a watch I can only read on sunny days. The visibility of this and most negative screens is terrible, but I had to have one. This will be the only negative screen in my tiny collection.

But this modification turned it pretty darn cool I think, and isn’t that what this is all about anyway? That slight ‘W’ on the lower left wiped out with just a touch more work.

Enter ‘Goo Gone Pro Power’. That’s the magic juice that when combined with a standard Q-Tip and a bit of elbow grease plus about 10 minutes per watch, the words go away. You simply dampen a Q-Tip with Goo Gone. Dampen, don’t drench. Start back and forth rubbing with the swab under moderate pressure over maybe ½” of text. Keep it up for a couple of minutes until you see the text begin to fade. Continue this process until the text is gone. Continue working off any surface text you want removed.

I don’t recommend this procedure on text paint within embedded or pressed wording, although it’s your watch and it might work. I think the best success will be with smooth surface text.

Here’s the work I did on two other watches. The eye can see no trace of the former words.

The Goo Gone definitely got on the edge of the acrylic watch crystals as I worked on bezel text, and it had absolutely no effect. This is not a caustic chemical.