Above the Line: The 1978 Rolex Submariner 5513 Maxi Mark 2

Somewhere in 1978, in the print shop that supplied dials for reference 5513, the word SUBMARINER moved up a line. Every 5513 dial before it had carried the depth rating on top and the model name beneath. On the dial now indexed as the Maxi Mark 2, the two swapped places, and they stayed swapped. This watch is one of those: a 40mm Submariner with a case serial in the 5.7 million band, a matte black dial with oversized tritium plots, and an aluminium bezel insert that has spent close to fifty years turning from black towards a smoky blue.

Rolex Built the Case Before It Built the Diver

The Submariner is a consequence of a case. Rolex, founded by Hans Wilsdorf in London in 1905 and settled in Geneva after the First World War, created what it describes as the first waterproof and dustproof wristwatch in 1926, sealing the movement inside a hermetic Oyster case. In 1927 an Oyster crossed the English Channel with the swimmer Mercedes Gleitze, a crossing of more than ten hours after which, by Rolex's own account, the watch was still in perfect working order. The self winding Perpetual rotor followed in 1931. By the early 1950s the company had a sealed, self winding watch and twenty five years of publicity built on getting it wet.

What it did not have was an instrument for people who worked underwater. That changed in 1953, the year the Submariner appeared, and across the rest of the decade the model moved through a rapid series of references while Rolex settled what a diving watch actually needed. Crown guards arrived in 1959, alongside the reference 5512, and with them came the case silhouette that would carry the Submariner through the next thirty years.

Reference 5513: The Submariner Without the Certificate

The 5513 arrived in 1962, around three years after the 5512, and it existed for a commercial reason rather than a technical one. Outwardly the two watches were near enough identical, sharing the 40mm Oyster case with crown guards, the acrylic crystal, the rotating aluminium bezel and the 200 metre rating. The difference sat beneath the dial. The 5512 carried a chronometer certified movement and charged accordingly. The 5513 did not, and that is the entire reason the reference number exists.

A movement engineered to cost less

Early 5513s ran the calibre 1530, and the bulk of production ran the calibre 1520, built from 1963 to 1980. The 1520 came out of the same family as the 1530, part of the first movement family Rolex developed entirely in house, but it was simplified everywhere simplification saved money. The Breguet overcoil hairspring and the Microstella regulating system went, replaced by a flat hairspring and a stick regulator. It beat at 19,800 vibrations per hour with a 42 hour reserve, in 26 jewels for most markets and 17 for the United States, and Rolex never submitted it for chronometer certification because it was never built to pass.

That decision is visible from a metre away. With no superlative chronometer officially certified text to carry, the 5513 dial holds only two lines of print below the centre. Two lines is the whole composition, which is why every small change made to that printing over the years stands out so clearly and why those changes have been catalogued in such detail. On a busier dial nobody would have noticed.

From gilt printing to a matte black dial

The dial went through a long evolution of its own inside that unchanged case. The earliest 5513s carried gilt dials, with gold coloured text sitting on a glossy black lacquer, lume that began as radium and became tritium, and a depth line printed in the same warm gold as the model name. From 1966 Rolex moved the reference to a matte black dial with flat white printing, and it stayed matte for around eighteen years, which is most of the reference's life. Within that matte era the depth line itself was printed two ways, either as 200m equals 660ft or with the figures reversed, and those two arrangements are what the terms meters first and feet first describe. Meters first belongs to the earlier matte dials of the 1960s. By the time the maxi dials arrived the depth line was reading feet first, as 660ft equals 200m, and the only real variables left on the dial were the size of the plots and the shapes of the letters.

The same reference, issued to the Royal Navy

The 5513 also had a working life that had nothing to do with retail. In the early 1970s Rolex supplied a military version to the British Ministry of Defence, fitted with fixed bar lugs so the strap could not part company with the watch, sword hands for legibility, a fully graduated sixty minute bezel rather than the commercial fifteen minute scale, and tritium markings. Same reference number, entirely different brief. It is a useful corrective to any sense that the 5513 was the lesser Submariner. When the Ministry of Defence wanted one, this is the number it ordered.

The Maxi Dial, Introduced in Late 1977

Rolex enlarged the luminous plots on Submariner dials in late 1977. The change itself is simple: bigger circles of tritium at the hour markers, a bigger triangle at twelve, more luminous material on the dial and more light coming back off it in poor visibility. The result is known as the maxi dial, and on the 5513 it ran until roughly 1984, when the matte dial gave way to a glossy dial with applied markers in white gold surrounds for the reference's final years. That makes the maxi era the last generation of Submariner dials on which the luminous material was painted straight onto a matte surface with no metal framing it at all.

Maxi dials turn up in cases carrying serials from around five million into the early six millions. Because the printing was revised batch by batch in a supplier's workshop rather than announced as a model change, it shifted repeatedly across those seven years, and the variants are now indexed as Mark 1 through Mark 5.

How the marks are told apart

The Mark 1, from late 1977 into 1978, is identified by an angular S in SUBMARINER, usually described as a zig zag, and by the depth rating printed above the model name. The Mark 2 is the one where the lines swap, putting SUBMARINER above the depth rating for the first time on this reference, with a rounder and curvier S and no serif on the f in 660ft. The Mark 3 pushed the plots larger again, close enough to the minute track that they read as lollipops, and brought conspicuously open sixes. The Mark 4 went back to the angular S of the Mark 1, with the equals sign sitting slightly right of centre. The Mark 5, the last of them, prints SUBMARINER wider than the depth rating beneath it and centres the equals sign under the A.

None of this was documented by Rolex. The sequence has been reconstructed by people comparing dated cases against dial printing over decades, and the most careful references are open about treating serial ranges as approximate rather than fixed. What can be stated with confidence is the order the variants appeared in and the rough window each occupies, which is enough to place a dial within a year or two.

What a Mark 2 says about a 5.7 million case

This is where dial and case can be checked against one another, which is the only real test available when both are the primary evidence. Published serial charts, themselves reconstructions rather than factory records, put the start of 1978 at roughly 5,238,000 and the start of 1979 at roughly 5,953,000, so a serial of about 5.7 million falls inside 1978. The Mark 2 is independently dated to 1978 and to cases from the mid five millions into the early six millions. The two lines of evidence meet in the same year, which is exactly what should happen on a watch whose dial and case have stayed together.

The Insert That Went Blue

Rolex began fitting anodised aluminium bezel inserts in 1959 and kept doing so on the Submariner for the next fifty years. The insert is an aluminium ring, anodised to build a hard oxide surface, dyed black, printed with its graduations and fitted with a luminous pearl at the zero marker. It is not paint on steel and it is not ceramic. It is a dyed oxide layer, and a dyed oxide layer is vulnerable to one thing above all others.

Ultraviolet light. Short wavelength light carries more energy than visible light, and that energy breaks down the pigment it lands on, which is why inserts fade in sunlight rather than in a drawer and why different colours fade at wildly different rates. Red pigment absorbs the destructive wavelengths and surrenders quickly, which is why the red half of a Pepsi bezel turns pink long before the blue half moves. Blue reflects far more of that energy and holds its colour for years longer. Black is not a single stable pigment but a composite, so when it degrades it does not simply lighten, it shifts. Most black inserts settle into charcoal grey. Some, like this one, come to rest in a grey with a blue cast, the effect commonly called a ghost bezel. Salt water, perspiration and the ordinary friction of a bezel being turned all play a part, but sunlight does the bulk of the work.

Two things follow from that. The first is that the fade is a record of where a watch spent its life rather than of how it was kept last year, since the change is slow and runs in one direction only. The second is that it now belongs entirely to the past. Cerachrom ceramic reached the GMT-Master II in 2005, precious metal Submariners in 2008 and steel ones in 2010, and by 2012 aluminium had disappeared from Submariner production. Ceramic does not fade. Whatever else the ghosted insert is, it is the visible end of a fifty year phenomenon that cannot begin again.

1978, and the Last Years of Matte and Acrylic

The year this watch was made was also the year Rolex began dismantling the formula it belonged to. In 1978 the Sea-Dweller 16660 arrived with a sapphire crystal in place of acrylic, water resistance doubled to 1,220 metres, a unidirectional bezel and the new calibre 3035 with quickset date. In 1979 the Submariner Date 16800 followed with sapphire and 300 metres. The professional line was moving to a harder crystal, a deeper rating and a modern high beat movement, and it was doing all of it while the 5513 was still in production and still being sold alongside.

The 5513 carried on regardless until 1989, the last Submariner to keep an acrylic crystal, and the no date Submariner did not receive sapphire until the 14060 arrived in 1990. A 1978 maxi 5513 therefore sits in a narrow and very specific position. It has the enlarged plots of the final matte dial generation, printed in the year the layout settled into the arrangement Rolex still uses, in a case rated to 200 metres, under a domed acrylic crystal, over a movement drawn up in 1963 to be reliable rather than certified. Within twelve months the flagship diver was a different kind of watch, and within six years the dial was a different kind of dial.

Final Thoughts

What makes this particular Submariner worth the attention is how much of its history sits on the surface rather than in the specification. The specification barely moved for twenty seven years. A 1978 5513 and a 1968 5513 share a case, a crystal, a bezel design, a depth rating and, near enough, a movement. What separates them is printing and pigment: where the model name sits in relation to the depth rating, how much tritium is on the plots, and how far the sun has pulled the black out of an aluminium ring.

The Mark 2 caught the moment the printing settled. The insert caught fifty years of light. Neither was designed and neither can be repeated, which is the ordinary way a tool watch becomes interesting. Rolex made a small change in a print shop in 1978, somebody wore the result outdoors for a very long time, and the weather did the rest.

References

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4. Bob's Watches, Rolex 5513 Submariner Review and Ultimate Buying Guide: https://www.bobswatches.com/rolex-blog/rolex-info/vintage-week-rolex-submariner-5513.html

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6. BeckerTime, Rolex Caliber 1520 and 1530: https://beckertime.com/blog/rolex-caliber-15201530/

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8. Watch Price Trend, Rolex Submariner 5513 Maxi Dial: https://www.watchpricetrend.com/wiki/Rolex_Submariner_5513_Maxi_Dial

9. Craft and Tailored, 1977 Rolex Submariner Ref. 5513 Mk. I Maxi Dial: https://www.craftandtailored.com/products/1977-rolex-submariner-ref-5513-mk-i-maxi-dial-1

10. Menta Watches, Rolex 5513 Maxi MK2 Submariner: https://mentawatches.com/product/rolex-5513-maxi-mk2-submariner/

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13. Bob's Watches, When Did Rolex Start Using Sapphire Crystal: https://www.bobswatches.com/rolex-blog/resources/rolex-start-using-sapphire-crystal.html

14. Bob's Watches, Rolex Sea-Dweller 16660 Triple Six Ultimate Guide: https://www.bobswatches.com/rolex-blog/watch-review/transitional-sea-dweller-16660-triple-six.html

15. Bob's Watches, Rolex Serial Numbers and Production Dates Lookup Chart: https://www.bobswatches.com/rolex-serial-numbers

• Case in very good condition, light wear visible. 
• Lightly polished
• Strap aftermarket nato

• Dial original MK2 maxi good condition, has imperfections at 6 o'Clock
• Hands original tritium good condition