Ink Concentrating While Sitting In A Pen :(

[Intensity]

I know it's inevitable that some water evaporates and ink becomes more concentrated/intense while sitting in a pen for long periods of time. But there are two issues I find related to this phenominon that I find annoying.

 

1. Freshly inked up pen. Write some with it on the first day, set it down, come back to it the next day, and the first couple lines of text will be extra concentrated, thus making for very uneven appearance if writing a long page. Not a huge deal, but I need to write a bit on a scrap page to get through the drier ink in the feed, for the feed to become saturated with the "normal" concentration of ink in the reservoir.

 

2. This one is the worst: some inks change their appearance dramatically after sitting in a pen unused for a week ir two. For instance, my Sailor inks or Oster's Fire and Ice become super concentrated, and what comes out is mostly covered up by heavy sheen. Sailor's Yama Dori writes like a purple-blue ink with purple sheen, for example.

 

One might think that's neat, but the problem is that this behavior is not uniform. Eventually, after writing half a page to a page, the ink line lightens, and I might eventually get back to the fresh ink appearance. Sometimes not, in which case it's not so bad. But some inks are bad offenders in non-uniformity unless used non stop.

 

My Herbin's Lie de The is pretty goid in this regard: it turns darker, but is still clearly the same color. R&K Scabiosa seems to sit in my pens for a long time and looks more or less the same.

 

Basically I'm finding that I can only keep 2-3 pens inked up at the same time to avoid running into this issue. If I have 5-10, I quickly run into the ink concentrating problem, as I can't use all 5+ every day regularly. This is the case with all of my pens, from cheap to very high end.

 

How do you deal with this phenomenon?

[Chrissy]

Ink concentration depends on the pen to a large degree. The looser the cap, the more water in the ink will evaporate, and the more concentrated the ink will become. Screw caps tend to keep more air out than slip caps, so inks will take longer to concentrate in pens with tighter fitting screw caps. Piston filling pens usually contain more ink than converter fillers, so ink keeps better in those pens too.

 

Another factor is how concentrated the ink is to start with. Sailor inks are more saturated and have a heavier dye load than say J.Herbin inks. So Sailor inks will become even more concentrated in pens with looser caps, and color change can therefore happen, and happen quicker.

 

If you want to keep ink in your pens for longer periods, then choose to use less concentrated/saturated inks and pens with screw caps. Also, keep them as full as possible, so there's less air in with the ink fill.

 

Dipping the pen in water to re-wet the feed before you start writing will also help with inks that have concentrated.

[chromantic]

I came to say pretty much what Chrissy said. My experience with this is mostly confined to loose snap cap pens, my JIFs in particular. Inspired Blue comes out (a very sumptuous) dark blue after having sat before eventually lightening up but in a Sport it writes the normal lighter color (similar to Skrip Turquoise) straight away. Inks in screw cap pens don't seem to be affected very much.

 

The one exception is Tokiwa-matsu I had in an M200; after a couple, three months, it turned almost black and looked sort of gritty, like particulates, when I flushed it. I thought maybe the ink had gone bad but it looked perfectly normal after refilling. But after another couple months, it had turned black again. Have thoroughly flushed the pen with ammonia this time but if I do re-ink it with something else, I'll fill it from a vial, in case it's the pen that's contaminated with something that's turning the ink black. I had another pen with Tokiwa in it that dried out and sat for a while, yet when I finally flushed it, the ink was the normal dark green color.

 

Chrissy suggestion of running the nib under water is a good one; I have to do this with the JIFs which are mostly filled with Sailors as they tend to dry in the nib after just a day or so and need help getting started, but the color definitely writes lighter straight off, Kana-cho especially.

[white_lotus]

I tend to not let ink sit in pens. I keep only two, at most three, pens with ink. And after a month I empty the pen and fully flush it.

[Noihvo]

[Intensity]

Thanks for your responses!

 

The pens and inks I've had issues with have ranged from low end, such as Jinhaos (not very high end, of course), and high end, such as silver Omas Paragon (piston-fill with a screw-on cap), and "midrange", such as a vintage Wahl Eversharp Skyline with a sac and a screw-on cap. Highly saturated inks are definitely the worst offenders, such as Tokiwa-Matsu, Yama-Dori, Fire & Ice, etc.

 

I will definitely keep in mind the advice to always fill a converter or reservoir as fully as possible, as I was not always doing so before.

 

I must say though that I don't consider a week or two to be a "long time" for a fill. It seems entirely reasonable to me to not use a pen for a week or two for whatever reason, such as if the ink in it is of an unusual color and is thus used only for my personal notes.

[senzen]

This also bothered me, I ended up keeping all my pens stored in pouches; trays might also work but I don't want to duplicate storage. It also depends on the pen, Sonnets evaporate almost before your eyes, Lamy Vistas from one day to the next, my Pelikan m600 and Sailor Professional Gear seem to never dry out.

 

I am quite relaxed about seeing Lie de Thé go from darker to lighter in the same sentence, but it really bugged me about Kon Peki and Ama Iro since they would end up looking the same. Myosotis also looks quite nice when evaporated, if quite different.

[Noihvo]