Skinny vs. Fat Hands 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.