The persistence of Shocking Blue

[mariom]

I recently loaded a a Parker 51 with Akkerman Shocking Blue with great writing results. After the pen ran dry, I went through my usual cleaning routine which is to flush the pen with water till it runs reasonably clear, then fill with water and leave it capped for a few days nib down. After two or three cycles of this there's usually no trace of ink showing, so the pen is dried and put away till its next rotation.

 

What I'm seeing with the Shocking Blue P51 is that even after 6-8 cycles, I'm getting significant amounts of ink showing up in the water. I've tried a couple of cycles with ammonia solution as well, but it doesn't seem to have helped. I know the collector in the P51 can really hold on to ink, but this is quite extreme. Any suggestions on how to get the pen clean, short of dis-assembling it?

 

Thanks

[A Smug Dill]

23 minutes ago, mariom said:

Any suggestions on how to get the pen clean, short of dis-assembling it?

 

Individually, or some combination of:

• filling the pen's ink reservoir as fully as possible with water, then submerging (at least the gripping section and the reservoir components of) the pen into a bath in an ultrasonic cleaning tank, and putting it through a cleaning cycle or three, to break up any solidified or crystallised ink attached to the reservoir wall or some cranny;
• fill the pen's ink reservoir with a commercial pen cleaning fluid such as Herbin Nettoyant Pour Stylo or Rohrer & Klingner Reiniger, which in my experience are more capable than homemade aqueous ammonia based solutions; and/or
• just give it time — more time than you'd ideally like to put the pen on the bench, perhaps — for ink remnants to dissolve into plain water filling the pen's reservoir.

A fill of Diamine Steel Blue, which I would expect to be very benign and easy to clean out, dried out in my Pilot Kaküno. Nothing I do seems to be able to clean out that little bit of ink that got stuck between the grooves on the rim of the piston plug in the CON-50 converter, which I cannot disassemble easily; not even five cycles in the ultrasonic cleaning tank could get rid of it, and neither concentrated (clear) aqueous ammonia solution nor Herbin pen cleaning fluid could get to it and dissolve it in reasonable time. So, I think all that is left to do is either fill the pen/converter with water and let it sit for a week, or fill it with something like Sailor Shikiori Doyou (which has a reputation for performing cleaning magic) which would overwhelm what little remnants of turquoise remain, and hopefully will have dissolved them after fill of ink has been used up in due course just writing with the pen normally.

[IThinkIHaveAProblem]

You might consider building a salad spinner centrifuge

 

i have. And it has saved me HOURS in pen cleaning. Especially “51”s!

 

i know this doesn’t answer why shocking blue is so persistent, but i hope it allows you to get the pen clean in a reasonable amount of time. 

[amberleadavis]

If you have some vintage Skrip ink or some Noodler's eel ink, run a fill of one of those through the pen.  It does help.\

 

Thank you, @IThinkIHaveAProblem, I'm off to buy a salad spinner.

[lapis]

My "technique" isn't far off from yours, but what I do is, after filling and rinsing 2-3-4-5-6x until the water is "reasonably" clear (as you say), I leave the pen filled with water and then standing up (without a cap) in water overnight. I'm often amazed as to how much colored the water still becomes overnight. In then repeat the above with new water containing a few drops of dishwater detergent (mixed, of course). If that doesn't help, I repeat again but this time with a bit of household bleach in the water (without detergent). After everything looks colorless, I repeat for the last time with de-ionized water.

All of that above baloney has always helped.

[IThinkIHaveAProblem]

6 hours ago, amberleadavis said:

 

Thank you, @IThinkIHaveAProblem, I'm off to buy a salad spinner.

The dollar store is your friend. 

[Sailor Kenshin]

10 minutes ago, IThinkIHaveAProblem said:

The dollar store is your friend. 

So's Rapido-Eze!

 

PS: Off to the dollar store.  Thanks.

[IThinkIHaveAProblem]

4 minutes ago, Sailor Kenshin said:

So's Rapido-Eze!

 

PS: Off to the dollar store.  Thanks.

I bought a small bottle of rapido eze a while ago but i havn’t needed it yet 

(i havn’t bought any new pens crusted with old ink lately)

 

have fun at the dollar store. @Ron Z’s salad spinner centrifuge is one of my best investments!  
- Fill pen with water; centrifuge it out.   

- Repeat until satisfactorily clean. 

[bunnspecial]

The last fill I made with Shocking Blue was a 149, a pen that I'd class as somewhere in the middle between easy and hard to clean.

 

Since I don't exactly have a shortage of pens(149s, 51s, or otherwise) I've fallen into cleaning in a way that folks here describe-I fill the pen with water, wait a few hours or overnight, and then empty it(or at least as best as I can with a 51) and see if the water comes out clear or still colored. I usually just leave the pens I'm cleaning on a corner of my desk.

 

In any case, I seem to remember spending about a week doing this with Shocking Blue on a 149. I'd not be surprised if a 51 added a few extra days to the process, which is why I mostly stick to easy-to-clean inks in my 51s.

[inkstainedruth]

Now trying to remember which pens I've used Shocking Blue in.  I don't remember whether I had the issues being brought up here, but I'm also more than a little OCD about flushing pens just in general.

Although I must say that it's a GLORIOUS color....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[mariom]

Thanks to everyone for their thoughts. It seems like patience is the answer.

 

Cheers.