Rolex Crown Dots: Different Designs To Indicate Different Metals

Rolex Crown Dots: Different Designs To Indicate Different Metals

Rolex Twinlock and Triplock crowns have different dot designs as a subtle way to distinguish between Rolex metal materials used to produce said timepieces. A Rolex platinum Daytona may look similar to a stainless Daytona, but how would one like to find a stainless steel crown on a platinum timepiece? So Rolex has a practical system of distinguishing crowns, see the chart below. Note there are three columns. Column 1 is stainless steel watches, column 2 is two tone and solid yellow, rose, and white gold, and column 3 is solid platinum (95%).

Let’s also see some real world examples. Below are two crowns found on two stainless steel Rolex watches, a Twinlock on a Rolex Milgauss 116400GV, and a Triplock on a Rolex Submariner 116610.

Below are the Triplock on a solid yellow gold Rolex 116528 Daytona, and a Twinlock crown on a solid yellow gold Rolex 118238 Day Date President. Note especially the larger middle dot underneath the Daytona crown.

Finally, see below for a Triplock crown on a platinum Rolex 116506 Daytona, and a Twinlock crown on a Rolex 118206 platinum Day Date President. Note this time on the Triplock the middle dot is the smallest surrounded by two larger dots. Platinum may seem visually similar to stainless steel, but Rolex has designed this system for easy distinguishing.

The system is very accurate for most models except the Rolex Datejust. See below for what we mean.

There is no crown design difference between a stainless steel Datejust and a two tone 116233 Datejust. And it’s been this way for a while… see below for a early 2000’s discontinued two tone Datejust 16233 and the same two tone Datejust found above. There is zero crown difference.

However, even though the crown designs are identical between the stainless and two tone Datejust models, we can confirm that the solid 18K gold Datejust models indeed have the two dot design found on the 18K Day Date.

We hope this post has been helpful in understanding the subtle differences among what seem like only small components of the Rolex timepiece.