Vintage Sheaffer Skrip Permanent Red And Rc35

[amberleadavis]

And here they are before the UV light or water. These are the scans.

 

http://www.sheismylawyer.com/2017_2_Ink/12-December/slides/2017-12-28_Ink_1.jpg

http://www.sheismylawyer.com/2017_2_Ink/12-December/slides/2017-12-28_Ink_2.jpg

http://www.sheismylawyer.com/2017_2_Ink/12-December/slides/2017-12-28_Ink_3.jpg

[amberleadavis]

More scans - I have sent these to JohnBoz.

 

http://www.sheismylawyer.com/2017_2_Ink/12-December/slides/2017-12-28_Ink_4.jpg

http://www.sheismylawyer.com/2017_2_Ink/12-December/slides/2017-12-28_Ink_5.jpg

http://www.sheismylawyer.com/2017_2_Ink/12-December/slides/2017-12-28_Ink_6.jpg

[amberleadavis]

It does appear that paper matters because the watered ink on the regular Ivey's paper did not show up under the UV light.

 

http://www.sheismylawyer.com/2017_2_Ink/12-December/slides/2017-12-28_Ink_7.jpg

http://www.sheismylawyer.com/2017_2_Ink/12-December/slides/2017-12-28_Ink_8.jpg

http://www.sheismylawyer.com/2017_2_Ink/12-December/slides/2017-12-28_Ink_9.jpg

[amberleadavis]

These will be more interesting once you see the comparison from John.

 

http://www.sheismylawyer.com/2017_2_Ink/12-December/slides/2017-12-28_Ink_10.jpg

http://www.sheismylawyer.com/2017_2_Ink/12-December/slides/2017-12-28_Ink_11.jpg

http://www.sheismylawyer.com/2017_2_Ink/12-December/slides/2017-12-28_Ink_12.jpg

Edited August 7, 2022 by amberleadavis
add images back in from broken link

[amberleadavis]

My assistant is stilling sending me pictures (I left my cell phone at home, silly me).

 

http://www.sheismylawyer.com/2017_2_Ink/12-December/slides/2017-12-28_UV_09.jpg

[welch]

OK, Amberlea, I take it that you are about to was some Sheaffer Skrip away from a page to see if it can be read with ultraviolet light?

 

I think Sheaffer claimed that RC35 would show even if writing had been eradicated.

 

You are probably too young to remember Ink Eradicator, but it was fearsome stuff, and potent. Small brown bottle with a plastic cap. The cap had a clear glass stick that reached into the liquid, which smelled a lot like bleach. We would load the stick, wipe it across our writing, and the ink was disappear. After a minute or so, the Eradicator would evaporate and we re-wrote a word or line...the only way to write an in-class essay without, sometimes, re-copying the page and throwing out the bad one.

 

So...the Whole World wants to know, after 50 years: would RC35 have worked?

[amberleadavis]

I would wager (but I won't wager because online gaming is not legal in my current location), that even if I used the eradicator that that the ink would have shown up with a UV light depending on the paper. I think that the older papers (which were not acid free) may have been better for showing up under the UV light.

 

Now, I sent a stack of these pages to my pen pal and he can do a round of test with bleach, but if you have an ink eradicator, I can send you a letter and you can try to eradicate it too.

[welch]

I would wager (but I won't wager because online gaming is not legal in my current location), that even if I used the eradicator that that the ink would have shown up with a UV light depending on the paper. I think that the older papers (which were not acid free) may have been better for showing up under the UV light.

 

Now, I sent a stack of these pages to my pen pal and he can do a round of test with bleach, but if you have an ink eradicator, I can send you a letter and you can try to eradicate it too.

 

Ah...I haven't seen ink eradicator in more than 45 years. It was fearsome stuff, but seems to have vanished as people sifted from the fountain pen as their main way to write.

[Noihvo]

 

[welch]

Amberlea, can you summarize? Does RC-35 actually work? Can your writing be read after being washed away?

 

As best I understood Sheaffer's claim, which I read about 1965, the UV light should be shined on a page of Skrip that had been washed away. The first pages show smeared red ink. Is the UV source above the sample pages?

 

**

 

Re-reading, I think:

 

- the washed writing sample show some read blobs where ink should be

 

- you notice that some paper mushes with the ink. I remember that we wrote with ordinary 20 lb and 16 lb three-hole paper ("National Paper Company"??) that handled fountain pens.

 

- you would "wager" that RC-35 Skrip would survive bleaching or old-time eradicator. I'd "wager" that if old Skrip survives water it survives enough!

Edited January 8, 2018 by welch

[johnboz]

While I haven't received Amberlea's sheets yet, I did some tests of my own.

 

First off, let me just say that it is really hard to photograph UV light and make it look anything like what your eyes see. With that being said, you'll just have to believe me for most of what I say.

 

How I tested:

I did a test with a few different brands of paper. I also used both vintage Skrip Permanent Red and vintage Quink Permanent Red, just to see if the Skrip was any different.

 

For each ink, I wrote two lines of text. The first line I left untouched. For the second line, I tried to remove as much ink as possible by swabbing the brand name (Skrip or Quink) with water and swabbing the word "Red" with a 50/50 bleach/water mix. Here's a photo of how that looked.

http://fountainpenlove.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/IMG_5943.jpg

 

Surprisingly, the Skrip held up pretty well to both the water and the bleach, while the Quink almost completely disappeared with the bleach.

 

Once I looked at each of these samples with a UV light, I was surprised to see the Skrip glowing! Interestingly, it only really showed up on the ink that had been exposed to water or bleach. I didn't see any fluorescing on the writing that had not been altered. It looks like RC-35 actually does fluoresce under UV light! The Quink didn't show any similar properties.

 

Here are the only images that (kind of) look good:

 

This is the lower-left piece of paper in the first image. You can see how bright the second "Skrip" is in this image. In person, it was a white/blue/red glow that looked really neat!

 

http://fountainpenlove.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/IMG_5949.jpg

This is the upper-right piece of paper. Here's it's much more obvious that the word "Red" is glowing.

 

I wanted to see if I could completely remove the ink from the paper, so I soaked a piece of paper for about 30 minutes. Unfortunately, some of the ink remained. I was surprised to see that there was no longer any detectable glow when I shined the UV light on that paper, so it looks like RC-35 will wash away with a good enough soaking.

 

Hope this helps and you found it somewhat useful!

Edited August 7, 2022 by amberleadavis
add images back in from broken link

[JakobS]

Here is an example of a will written in Sheaffer Emerald Green with RC-35, and the ability to recover what was written when pages of it experienced water damage:

https://books.google.com/books?id=-exqdS1GIHEC&pg=PA129&lpg=PA129&dq=Sheaffer+RC-35&source=bl&ots=g0O181Jl8w&sig=1CyAy0HGJ8fGBMPSztWZ91MoqMw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiSzaOX1OjcAhWMo1kKHS5CDxsQ6AEwDnoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q=Sheaffer%20RC-35&f=false

 

Ah... I see Ruth posted this earlier.....

Edited August 13, 2018 by JakobS

[amberleadavis]

That is super cool.

[welch]

Thank you, all! It looks like Sheaffer had a (mostly) good idea with RC-35. Of course, their Permanent inks are stubborn on paper (or clothing), but RC-35 was more than just advertising magic. Ah, for the days when every US drugstore had a stack of Skrip in the school supplies section!

[amberleadavis]

I miss those days too.

[amberleadavis]

I uploaded the images from the broken links.