Today I received a Pelikan Level 5 FP I won on ebay.

I thought I understood the instructions correctly, but the first filling went very poorly. I managed to fill the "first" reservoir (the big one), but no ink flows to what I think is the reservoir the nib uses... I think it might have been that I didn't align the dot on the filling valve with the correct dot on the pen itself (the dot on the valve is black, the dot on the pens itself is white). The pen write...

Please help! If I filled the pen incorrectly is there any way to undo that first filling?

This is going to sound very obvious, but have you tried giving the pen a little shake? With my Level 5 the ink does not always flow easily from the large reservoir to the smaller one that supplies the nib, and I sometimes have to give it two or three shakes.

Remember that the knob at the end has to be turned in order to open the seal between the two reservoirs. You can tell that the knob is in the right position to allow ink to flow between the reservoirs if the inner portion of the knob is sunken and the outer portion raised (in this position the ink bottle shouldn't fit properly on to the end of the pen).

If you really need to undo the filling then you can do it using an empty Level filling bottle to suck the ink back out - it works, and you can use this to clean out the pen if you decide to change colours (and if you used the standard Level blue ink then I suspect you may well want to change colours soon! I didn't like that stuff at all)

Hi,

As well as aligning as per the instructions, you can try tapping the main reserve tank to break surface tension and get the ink flowing, the first time I filled mine I had to leave it standing nib down (with the cap on) for about an hour to get the bottom tank filled, tapping makes it rather quicker I have found.

I actually quite like the ink that came with it.

Andy

Thanks for clearing this mystery for me, guys! I shaked it around a bit and, lo an behold, it fills!