I recently opened an FP that had been capped for no more than a week only to find mold (ICK! The nice white lacy kind tinged in spots with the red of the ink, Still ICK!) growing in the fins of the nib and around the collar of the pen where the nib sits in the barrel of the pen. Several questions come to mind:

First, what do I use to clean the pen? Once mold starts, like behind the walls of your house, it never really goes away and continues to creep. I'd use an ammonia solution in most cases, but not with a pen. Any thoughts? Do I have to clean the cap too?

Second, how do I dry the pen sufficiently to prevent recurrence (I can not put it in the oven)?

Third, what causes this? Is it the ink without enough additives to prevent mold? Or is it some latent "creeping crud" in my pen?

Fourth, is the pen now marred for life?

I was using a Conway Stewart red ink cartridge in a Conklin Ohio FP.

Any and all thoughts welcome.

Respectfully submitted, Scribe 75

As noted on Richard Binder's site on the Care and Feeding page, your pen will require complete disassembly and application of fungicide. This is a job best left for a professional who knows the innards backwards and forwards.

Sorry for your nasty experience.

Good luck!

Don

Thanks for the lead Don. I had forgotten that I had read about mold and its eradication before on Richard's website. Of course, nothing like that would ever happen to me! So I had erased it from my mind.

Any thoughts as to cause so I can avoid recurrence?

Thanks, Scribe 75

Yeeech!! I feel for you, buddy.

Send it express to God. (AKA Richard Binder).

I note from Richard's website he will be closed until tomorrow. Off it'll go at the next available opportunity.

I'll don the HazMat suit - gloves, helmet and all - to box it. Do you think I need to label it "Bio Hazard" in Orange tags? (joke, feeble).

It was unpleasant surprise, but not too bad. Another week and I suspect I would've had a Superfund site.

I had mold like that in a nice new Pelikan that I left for two weeks in a desk drawer. The mold grew all through the feed and down into the ink reservoir. Luckily, the pen is a demonstrator so I could see when I had flushed it all out. I used ammonia and water to flush with. That was several years ago and there has been no recurrence.

Tryphon sells an additive ("Inksafe"?) used to keep ink from becoming a biology experiment. Add one drop to a bottle of ink and you are good to go. This won't help, though, if you are using cartridges.

You can dry a pen out adequately without using heat. Just flush it with water, shake it out as dry as possible, and leave it nib-down on a tuft of facial tissue for a few days.

Your pen is not marred for life.

As for "the creeping crud", it is everywhere. Mold spores are really tiny and float around in the air currents. You breathe in thousands of them every day. Keeping them all away from your pens is impractical. You just need to use ink that kills mold when the spores germinate. Maybe someone forgot to put fungicide in that particular batch of ink cartridges?

Paddler

Paddler - Thanks for the tips. I think I have now figured the culprit(s). It was an old bottle of ink (either the bottle or the ink, or both, since I did some switching of inks and bottle in this instance). I think the ink that I used with this pen at one point before using the cartridges lacked some fungicide. Eihter that or teh bottle was not properly cleaned before transferring the ink. Certainly, the mold I now see floating around in that ink bottle would seem to suggest that is where the problem started.

Scribe 75