My new Monteverde Invincia (in Rose) writes OK once started, but when capped for a period of time it's hard to start and usually takes a shake to start 'er up.

I have disassembled the nib and feed, looked for flash, debris, etc, cleaned nib, feed and converted in an ultrasonic cleaner with ammonia and water and tweaked the slit width. All to no avail.

Using Waterman Florida Blue with either cartridge or converter, it seems that the ink retreats from the nib. If you hold the nib up to the light after being capped and stored upright for a couple of hours, you can see light through the slit... no ink.

Any thoughts on a fix? Feed modification needed? Other thoughts?

TIA for any help.

Steve

I finally determined that the tines were too far apart (apparently). To correct this, I removed the nib and feed and crossed over the tines to close the gap - took a bit of fiddling, then more fiddling to align the tip of the nib.

Upon reassembly the nib was scratchy, so more fiddling with alignment and then finally some smoothing on 12000 grit nail buffer and sapphire knife honing stone. A little more on the cardboard backing of a pad and now it's pretty smooth.

Hope this helps someone else cure some problems. BTW, this is a steel nib and I was pretty comfortable 'abusing' it. I don't think I would have tried this on a gold nib.

Steve

I have a Parker Sonnet that acts like that -- sort of. The ink won't flow unless I hold the nib under running water. Then, it writes excellently for a few minutes, but if I cap it and try to use it again 10 minutes later, the ink doesn't flow. It's very frustrating. It's at the pen shop being cleaned in their ultrasonic cleaner, and if that doesn't do the trick, I guess I'll be shipping it back to Parker, because it's far too nice (and expensive, to me, but my usual pen price range is around $50) to just give up on.

I'd sure be open to suggestions!

I had the same problem and it turned out to be a split inner cap that was letting the nib dry out. A quick trip to the repair center for a new inner cap and all was well.

I had this problem with a Sheaffer cartridge pen. The slit looked OK; it seemed to be the same width as other pens that were working well. Ammonia solution and dish detergent washes did not help. I finally put in a fresh Skrip cartridge and began to write a lot with the pen. The problem went away by itself.

Paddler