Today I tried to clean and broke one of my favourite pens - Tropen Scholar. I broke it while trying to remove the nib which is removed like in Pelikan M200. I twisted it and the pen cracked. Many dried ink remained inside, so I decided to fill it with alcohol in order to dissolve the ink more quickly.

So my question is what was the problem? Cleaning with alcohol or excessive force while trying to remove the nib?

Dima,

What actually broke on your Tropen Scholar? The nib & feed 'unit', the section, or another part of the pen?

Don Jr

My suspicion-- dried ink was acting as an adhesive on the point. For future reference, 1:10 household ammonia:water rather than alcohol is the way to go (although I'm assuming the availability of ammonia as a cleaning product everywhere, which one really should not do) to loosen things up-- fill the pen with it, the stand the pen in a glass with enough in to just cover the point. That usually does the trick.

A clearer description of where the pen cracked or a picture might get some suggestion for fixing it, too. Some people here are pretty good at that sort of thing.

The section. Feed and nib remained complete.

Here is the picture of the pen. Its quality is poor but I think it's possible to see what broke.
Click to view attachment