Piston (bottle) filling pens

December 27, 2005

I've seen it posted that new pens should be rinsed in a detergent/water solution before first use, and converters should be rinsed too. What about these bottle filling pens? Do you fill them with water and a little detergent when you first get them, before using ink? thanks.

December 27, 2005

Rinsing with a water-dishwashing liquid solution is only required if the pen shows ink flow problems. If ink flow is good, it's best to leave the pen alone and keep using it!

December 27, 2005

I have never used that technique on any new pen, and have not suffered any trouble.

I have tried it, once, on a pen that wouldn't write well.

December 28, 2005

i, too, usually reserve this treatment for stubborn flow problems

December 28, 2005

I make it a practice to flush any new pen just to be sure. It's a practice some with much more FP experience advised me on and one that has served me well. Doesn't take long, and ensures that any residual oils are gone so you should get free-flowing ink right off!

December 28, 2005

Hi pvdiamon,

I always rinse and flush a new pen with water to which some liquid dishwashing soap is added, the non-perfumed variety. We're talking 1-2 drops of the soap to 1 glass of water, that's all. It is not always necessary, but it doesn't harm the pen, and gets rid of any muck (oily or greasy residues from the pen manufacturing process) in a very easy way. Just note: don't overdue the soap! It will influence the flow characteristics of the ink for the next few fills at least .

BTW, this is something I recommend to all and everybody using fountain pens all the time. It just makes the pen work properly in case there was some muck in/on the feed etc. I found the only pens that never need this treatment, so far, are new Waterman pens. All other brands seem to require this, some always, and some occasionally.

Another thing I always recommend is something I call "priming the feed". This entails, with a new pen, filling it with an easy flowing, easy going ink, like Waterman Blue Black or Florida Blue, or Parker Quink Washable Blue. Somehow, these inks always work well in any pen, and after one or two fills of this stuff, the pen will work with most other inks. And if it doesn't, you'll find you have to adjust the flow of the pen. I call this priming the feed, because I noticed that teh feed assumes (part of) the colour of the ink when doing this. Somehow I (like to) think that this trick works because the feed gets saturated with this ink, soaked through and through. However, this is an assumption only. I tjust happens to be that this does the trick.

I have done fairly extensive experiments with pens (ok, ok, call me mad ), where I had several pens of the same brand, same model, and same nib, and filled one with WM BB, and the other with either Noodler's Ottoman Azure, or with Noodler's Ottoman Rose. The latter two are both highly concentrated inks.

It would take normally 4 or 5 fills with just the Ottoman inks for pens to stop skipping, before writing the way they were suppose to. This actually makes you start thinking there is something wrong with the pen, and you have to be rather persistent to finish a test like this...

Now, with WM BB, these pens wrote fine straight away, and after one or 2 fills, they wrote fine with the two other inks too.

I also did a cross-test, where I used a new pen after one fill with any of the Ottoman inks, which was skipping, with WM BB. Same result. No probs with WM BB, and after 1 fill, ok with either Ottoman inks.

I did this test with other high dye content inks as well, same result.

So far I found 1 model of pen for which this didn't work, and 1 ink for which this didn't work. The pen is a Waterman Edson Saphire, of which I only have 1 sample, so I don't know if this is valid for all of them. It just doesn't like highly concentrated inks or dense inks, whatever you want to call those. It does work extremely well with WM BB, so I didn't bother to try and adjust the ink flow.

The ink I mentioned is Herbin Café des Îsles, a very nice chocolate to coffee brown ink. The priming with WM BB didn't work here. The only thing that worked was adjusting the ink flow of the pen. Since then: no problem.

Anyway, HTH, warm regards, Wim

December 29, 2005

Thanks for the comprehensive suggestions! An additional problem is that with converters, I find that the pens can skip and if I manually push the piston on the converter as the ink is used up, it takes care of the problem. I've tried washing converters with soap to no avail for this problem. Is that typical, to have to move the converter manually?

April 21, 2012

wimg, do you do anything special to dry the pen between flushing it with water and "priming the feed" with a reliable ink? I.e., force-dry it, or let the water evaporate over a day or two? Or, just squirt out as much as possible, and pump ink in and out a few times until it can be regarded as sensibly undiluted?