Refilling A Fountain Pen.

[pawnraider]

 

I would strongly advise you not to continually remove the nib, it is not necessary and will probably prove disastrous sooner or later. Just flush the pen through if you deem it necessary

Will do and thanks.

[ISW_Kaputnik]

When I see a thread like this, I wonder how many of us have deliberately tried pushing the limits on times between cleanings just to see how long we can go before there are problems. I haven't.

 

My own habits are much like the "usual advice" given in posts above. I clean my pens before putting them away dry. I clean them before changing inks if they're going to be filled by dipping in a bottle, although that's partly in order not to taint the bottle of ink with inks having different colors or properties. I rotate pens and inks enough that I'm unlikely to fill a pen from the same bottle more than three or four times before putting it away for a while, or at least changing the ink, but I suppose if I were filling from the same bottle for the fifth time in a row, I'd consider giving it a flush first. I don't disassemble pens to clean them more than necessary, and that's usually not very much, if at all.

 

But I'm just being cautious. I don't have any hard data to support the above, just what seems to me like common sense.

[pajaro]

I have some pens I have never actually cleaned or flushed. Some of these have been going for years. I operate the filler to fill the pen. Sometimes I operate the filler two or three times. Changing inks I might observe the beautiful mix of colors. Some pens are amenable to this treatment, some are not. I don't do it with cartridge pens where I am putting ink into a cartridge with a syringe. Those I occasionally flush with a bulb fitted over the section threads. Whenever.

[OMASsimo]

Well, flushing pens is certainly a good and recommended practice. But honestly, in the days of "One man one pen" nobody did it, and that was the time when fountain pens were used the most. I grew up with mandatory fountain pens in elementary school. They were cartridge fillers and there wasn't even a way to flush them, at least not those days. So, they went for years of continuous use without a single flush. After elementary school I moved on to better pens. The instructions may have advised us to flush occasionally but nobody did. Now the fountain pen seems to have turned into a pet rather than a tool and all of the sudden people care about flushing and even taking the nib out all the time. Feel free if that rocks your boat but in my experience it's totally unnecessary. And removing the nib frequently even might harm the pen.

 

Nowadays, I'm kind of a collector, though I still use all of my many pens. This changes the picture slightly because I rotate and a pen might not see use in within a year. In that case it's very advisable to clean the pen before putting it to rest. Otherwise, I might find it like many of my vintage pens when I buy them. But even that isn't a major problem. Soaking them for a few days and using an ultrasonic cleaner so far resolved even the most stubborn problems.

 

In short, flush if you wish or need to but don't think you have to all the time.

[Brandywine]

Well, flushing pens is certainly a good and recommended practice. But honestly, in the days of "One man one pen" nobody did it, and that was the time when fountain pens were used the most. I grew up with mandatory fountain pens in elementary school. They were cartridge fillers and there wasn't even a way to flush them, at least not those days. So, they went for years of continuous use without a single flush. After elementary school I moved on to better pens. The instructions may have advised us to flush occasionally but nobody did. Now the fountain pen seems to have turned into a pet rather than a tool and all of the sudden people care about flushing and even taking the nib out all the time. Feel free if that rocks your boat but in my experience it's totally unnecessary. And removing the nib frequently even might harm the pen.

 

.......

 

That very much sounds like my school experience .....

My blue Pelikano served me well for five years before I flushed it for the first time (always Pelikan Royal Blue, of course).

And it served me well afterwards, too, until I switched to a newer model P460 in red that served me for the rest of my education.

I even wrote my final exams with that (and still Royal Blue ink).

I flushed that one only once: when a classmate got a new pen, he no longer wanted his old one and gave it to me.

Before I started with it, I flushed it - as a ceremony to make it mine

 

But when I tried Pelikan 4001 Brilliant Black in my Montblanc Carrera I had to flush it because that ink would clog in it.

 

How often one should flush a pen mostly depends on the ink in use:

Iron Gall inks or inks with nano-parts may ask for regular flushing as a precaution to prevent damage,

other (mostly washable) inks like Pelikan Royal Blue will tolerate much less attention.

Thousands of German schoolkids proove that every day!

 

By the way: When I got drafted into the army we had rifles that were older than us and had been worn out

not by shooting but by CLEANING them!

 

Rühren!

Weitermachen!

Jawoll!

[senzen]

My one Pelikan m600 has been through numerous ink changes, never skips a beat; it's good to clean from time to time but in all honesty with Pelikan it could be twice a year... Unless it's an ink that gunks up, in which case I wouldn't use it with a Pelikan and its enclosed nib unit, but with a pen that's easy to dismantle and clean, like a Lamy Safari.

[RoyalBlueNotebooks]

 

 

Yep, back in the olden days...'50-60's everyone I knew was ignorant of pen cleaning.

Back in school, late 1990s and 2000s, I also didn't know anything about fountain pen cleaning and of course my parents never taught because they also didn't know about it.

Honestly speaking, I make do with the usual converter flush or overnight immersion most of the times.

[RoyalBlueNotebooks]

When I see a thread like this, I wonder how many of us have deliberately tried pushing the limits on times between cleanings just to see how long we can go before there are problems. I haven't.

 

My parents used fountain pens in the 1950s for school. Nobody taught anything about fountain pen maintenance back then. My parents told me that you had your fountain pen (usually hand-me-down from older siblings) that lasted you through school, then you were rewarded a "graduation pen" for your future work if you lived in a wealthy family (sons and daughters of farmers didn't need any graduation stationery products, of course), then you grew up to buy your own fountain pens if you wanted. (Spoiler alert: Then mass-produced ballpoints and rollerballs happened. Damn them. : (( )

 

 

But why I wrote this stuff. Because one of my mother's fountain pens, a Pelikan 120, sat in her drawer for 55 years. She gave it to me months ago to check if it still wrote. Out of curiosity, I tried to write with it without any maintenance. It wrote but it was a very dry, thin line. Finally I removed the nib and feed to flush the pen: the feed was almost all full of crusted ink but it washed out eventually. The stainless steel nib is covered in blue-ish-colored rust on the bottom half, and has spots of rust on the top part. /shuddering at the memory/ I hope to never see a nib in that condition ever again in my life.

 

 

Morale of the story: Do NOT experiment on your pens by keeping a stainless steel-nibbed pen inked up for 55 years without flushing.

[Bo Bo Olson]

 

Being cheap and living in Germany I got a lot of old hide in the dark of the drawer for a couple of generations piston pens.

If you are going to hide your pen for so long, do use Pelikan or MB Royal Blue, the pen cleans out in a hurry......

Royal Blue will come out in the water of a bathroom sink in a nice cloud.

 

Blue Black....comes out in strings, needs to be soaked much longer, and takes 2-3 times longer to clean than the same age Royal Blue.

 

What do you think the ink was Royal Blue or another?

[pajaro]

It seemed that back in the sixties ink makers put some kind of cleaning agents in the inks, and I don't ever remember anyone mentioning pen flushing. Not until I joined this online forum and came in contact with all uber enthusiastic enthusiasts. Especially the disassemblers for cleaning. Most are new to the field, and they want, understandably to play with their toys. Perhaps they will settle down after a while.

 

Some of the inks marketed today might make it wise to consider periodic cleaning if you use the saturated inks. Back in the day we commonly used pretty safe inks. Sheaffer's or somesuch. I briefly tried something other than blue black, before tiring of the other colors and deciding blue black was easiest to read.

[ParkerDuofold]

It seemed that back in the sixties ink makers put some kind of cleaning agents in the inks, and I don't ever remember anyone mentioning pen flushing. Not until I joined this online forum and came in contact with all uber enthusiastic enthusiasts. Especially the disassemblers for cleaning. Most are new to the field, and they want, understandably to play with their toys. Perhaps they will settle down after a while.

 

Some of the inks marketed today might make it wise to consider periodic cleaning if you use the saturated inks. Back in the day we commonly used pretty safe inks. Sheaffer's or somesuch. I briefly tried something other than blue black, before tiring of the other colors and deciding blue black was easiest to read.

+1.

 

Yes, Parker Quink used a concoction called Solv-X, which was supposed to "clean your pen as you write"... according to the label.

 

All vintage inks used phenol, (carbolic acid) and who knows what else, plus they weren't so dye-laden as they are now... not to mention the pigmented and carbon inks.

 

 

- Anthony

[eharriett]

I have pen ADD. I like rotating pens and colors around after a fill or two. So I wash out before they go back into storage. Usually that’s only one fill. I have a couple pens where the same ink stays in them, like my Twsbi always has KWZ Thief’s Red and there’s my BSB and KTC eyedroppers. But even those I tend to soak the nib and let dry before I put more ink in them. Just to be sure.

 

My vintage sac pens I’ll treat old school. If they had vintage ink in them, they get filled and used until I’m ready to stop using them, then they get flushed. People maybe cleaned their old pens out once a year, if that, as long as they used the same ink (Solv-X: it CLEANS while you write!) so if I want to keep one of my vintage inks going for a bit, I won’t even bother. I’ve had vintage Skrip Blue Black in a Snorkel for about 5 months and not even thinking about a cleaning until I get tired of it. But if I put a new ink in a sac pen, I’ll do a flush after a fill or two. Not a complete fill, just a drain to make sure all is well.

 

I do all this just because I think it is fun. I like flushing my pens. I like changing them. I like new inks in new pens. It is satisfying to me.

[RoyalBlueNotebooks]

 

 

What do you think the ink was Royal Blue or another?

I'm going out on a limb here and assume that this question is for me.

 

As far as my parents have reported, in Italy in the 1940s and 1950s the only fountain pen ink that could be found in countryside towns and villages belonged to the Pelikan 4001 series.

 

My mother could only remember that it was a blue ink, and when I flushed the pen the color turned slightly sapphire, so I guess it was Konigsblau. Small mercies!

 

By the way, I'm still amazed that the pen wrote with 55 years of dried ink in the feed and nib section. An applause to Pelikan.

 

.

About the presence of cleaning agents in Parker ink, that's very interesting, I had no idea.

 

I also think that some people disassemble their pen at every flushing because of the popularity of staining inks, iron gall inks and nano-pigmented inks. The theory that they consider the pen a toy is also plausible. It seems strange to me that fountain pens are considered a hobby since to me they are ordinary writing instruments like gel pens or rollerballs, but if you haven't grown up using them, it makes sense that you over-care about flushing yours.

 

Going back to special fountain pen inks: to me knowing that there are fountain pen iron gall inks for instance was a shock. I had always known that iron gall inks were for dip pens only. When I came across the Platinum Classic series of inks, I literally gaped at my monitor. Not to mention glitter inks and BSB-level of saturation.

Edited December 13, 2017 by RoyalBlueNotebooks

[KellyMcJ]

Weren't fountain pen safe iron gall inks used right up through the 20th century? I can't imagine Registrar's is a NEW invention. How were those inks treated "back in the day"?

[Brandywine]

Weren't fountain pen safe iron gall inks used right up through the 20th century? I can't imagine Registrar's is a NEW invention. How were those inks treated "back in the day"?

 

Back then that was not so much a problem as you would use your (one and only) fountain pen all day every day,

so there was little chance that the ink would ever dry out in it.

Then you would flush the feed of your piston pen regularly by filling it up again.

 

This only became an issue when people ceased to use their fountain pens.

[KellyMcJ]

 

Back then that was not so much a problem as you would use your (one and only) fountain pen all day every day,

so there was little chance that the ink would ever dry out in it.

Then you would flush the feed of your piston pen regularly by filling it up again.

 

This only became an issue when people ceased to use their fountain pens.

That's what I figured... When I used a pen with registrar's regularly I never flushed it.... Just worked the converter back and forth a few times in the ink.

 

Now I'm using nano particle ink in my daily carry and I'm wondering if it needs any more special care than the iron gall did.

[Arkanabar]

Eeesh. Fully disassembling your pen each fill is like doing a complete engine rebuild for your car every oil change.

[KellyMcJ]

Eeesh. Fully disassembling your pen each fill is like doing a complete engine rebuild for your car every oil change.

 

This...the way I see it, every disassembly comes with a risk of damage. I don't choose to take that risk unless I have to (or it's a cheap pen I want to play with. I don't take my $50+ pens apart unless I need to.)

[OMASsimo]

Weren't fountain pen safe iron gall inks used right up through the 20th century? I can't imagine Registrar's is a NEW invention. How were those inks treated "back in the day"?

 

Yes, you are absolutely correct about this. The famed Pelikan 4001 blue-black wasn't a pure iron gall ink but it always contained some. Some people claim it still does. If I recall correctly, it's IG content was much reduced in the 1970s. IG inks were document proof but could lead to corrosion due to it's often high acidity. This wasn't an issue for many vintage pens with gold nibs because there wasn't anything to corrode. The other issue was clogging of the feed. But that used to be of little concern as long as people used their pens on a daily basis. And the pens were usually flushed with ink rather than anything else.

 

By the way, the solve-X in the Parker ink was blamed to may damage older celluloid pens.

 

 

 

Eeesh. Fully disassembling your pen each fill is like doing a complete engine rebuild for your car every oil change.

 

+1

 

I wouldn't remove the nib of a $1000 collectible pen unless I absolutely have to. And I wouldn't do this with any of my vintage pens either. Do you take your car apart when you fill it at the gas station?

[SoulSamurai]

 

I wouldn't remove the nib of a $1000 collectible pen unless I absolutely have to. And I wouldn't do this with any of my vintage pens either. Do you take your car apart when you fill it at the gas station?

 

 

Some people who are "in to" cars like to take cars apart and rebuild them. I guess it's the same with pens? Of course those are old secondhand cars that need work done anyway, but the point is that the act of disassembling and reassembling something can be satisfying.