Skinny vs. Fat Hands Versions of The Rolex Daytona

Skinny vs. Fat Hands Versions of The Rolex Daytona

Nov 06

Skinny vs. Fat Hands Versions of The Rolex Daytona
By: John B. Holbrook, II
September 17th, 2005

A question which seems to repeatedly come up from Rolex fans interested in the Cosmograph Daytona is, “what is meant by skinny or fat hands?”

Mid way through the F series production, Rolex made a slight change to the Daytona. Specifically, the hour and minute hands were replaced with hands which were wider and thus dubbed the “fat hands” Daytona.

Here’s a photograph of the early F Series white dial Daytona I owned which was the last of the “skinny hand” variants:

Now here’s a photo of my recently acquired F series white dial Daytona which was later in the production series (7xxx serial number):

Spot the difference? It’s a little tricky so I created this comparison picture – keep in mind there’s a slight variation in proportion between these two photos so don’t compare them too closely for size and scale:

Here’s a close up of the dial – you can see here that the white gold hands on the “fat hands” model actually have some black paint along the center to improve contrast against the silver subdials:

I have to say that I do like the new fat hands on the white Daytona dial – in addition to being more visible during the day, the hands hold a bit more Super Luminova, so their more visible at night as well.

You can discuss this article in the Rolex Forum of my online luxury watch discussion forum community WATCH TALK FORUMS.