So I have some old vintage Sheaffer Skrip Permanent Royal Blue bottles from an auction and some of the bottles' interiors are heavily coated with dried ink.

Unfortunately, my experience with ink has been limited to Sheaffer Skrip Black in cartridges and Levenger's Cobalt Blue. This is my first exposure to vintage ink.

So what's the general advice on reconstituting dried ink in a bottle?

I was considering adding some distilled water. I figure I'd add only a 1/4 bottle's worth of water, then shake vigorously. I'd let it sit a day, shake again, and wait another day.

Are there things in old Skrip that upon evaporation disappear (phenol? fungicides? surfactants?) such that I need to add stuff like InkSafe or SterilInk?

Do I need a fuel filter too?

I think the general rule is - add distilled water, give it time to dissolve, if it doesn't all dissolve, don't use it.

Of course, if you add 1/4 bottle and it doesn't all dissolve, then it might be because you have more than 1/4 bottle worth of powder. If the resulting ink seems pretty dark, ad more water and see. I wouldn't worry about the fungicides off-hand, but it might not hurt.

You could try filtering - I have done that, but I am not sure that it worked out so well.

John

I love this color. I wish I could find its equivilent in a modern ink. In any case, I do the same as you did, add water, but I also filter it through a paper coffee filter. I wait to see how the ink "changes", before using it in one of my pens and I don't use it in any of my "good" pens. Just in case.

I added water to about 6 bottles of dried Skrip Permanent Royal Blue and noticed a few things:

1) The bottle cap corrosion is probably caused by the Skripwell design itself. By forcing the user to flip the bottle upside down, the chances of ink getting under the cap seal are increased. Nonethless, I replaced cap seals with cutouts from foam disposable plates. And for additional water resistance, I rubber cemented the seal to the cap.

2) Shaking reconstituted Skrip vigorously can result in "foamy" ink.

3) More than 50% of the bottles came out blue black or dark teal. I'm not sure why some rehydrated inks were blue while others were not.

4) No moldy smell. All the rehydrated inks smell like Skrip.

Here's a sample of the various inks with a dipped medium flex nib, (extra?) fine Sheaffer Triumph nib, and medium Sheaffer NoNonsense nib. Sorry about the color and white balance. I don't have a scanner readily available.