Scum floating in ink?!?

[Dillo]

3 hours ago, hbquikcomjamesl said:

And I've left myself a note to look at the stuff and report back. I finally remembered what it is: Microban 24 bathroom cleaner, "fresh scent."

 

That uses an ammonium chloride compound as the disinfecting agent, and PMMA has very limited resistance to these compounds. I would not use it.

[hbquikcomjamesl]

More foreign material, this time in a different ink. I was about to refill my "Cognac demonstrator" Pelikan M200, and I noticed a cluster of dark gray lumps, roughly spherical, floating in my bottle of Pelikan brown 4001(!?!) (The bottle has a dark blue label, which should give you some idea of the age of the ink).

 

I was able to fish out some of it with a bamboo skewer; it seems to be somewhat fibrous in texture.

 

Pictures, such as they are, to follow in the morning, when I have access to my office to download them from my phone.

[Dillo]

I've seen this before in Pelikan's Brilliant Brown, but I will say it's not generally common in my experience. Certain colors and formulas are less stable than others

[hbquikcomjamesl]

And here are the pictures. First a shot down the neck of the bottle, illuminated with a penlight.

 

 

Then a (sadly very blurry) shot of the crud that came out.

[Dillo]

I'd toss the ink if I were you

[LizEF]

Yeah, that's mold. Toss it.

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Well, I went ahead and bought the two bottles of Conklin, and cleaned out my "cognac" demo M200. Turns out I could have easily fit the barrel into my cheap-o Harbor Freight ultrasonic cleaner, but I just put the nib in. Cavitated it for about 15 cycles, first with plain water, and then with a couple of drops of Dawn. Meanwhile, I soaked and swabbed out the barrel. I eventually used my toothbrush (the shank, against the outside of the barrel, which was completely full of water) to lightly cavitate that out as well.

 

Then, with the pen reassembled, and cleaner than it's been since I first put it into service, I tried some of the Conklin "Rich Mahogany." Result below:

Good match for the Pelikan 4001 brown. Maybe a bit less reddish.

 

Oh, and I almost forgot: I dumped the remaining Pelikan 4001 brown down the drain, and rinsed out the bottle. Found a line of suspicious little round dark spots along the fill level. Oh, well, I was planning on soaking the bottle in 1:1 laundry bleach anyway.

[Dillo]

I wouldn't put the barrel of the pen in the ultrasonic cleaner. You may end up with water behind the piston seal from water coming into the pen through the piston knob end. It's tough to get water out of there once it gets in. It's best to just do the nib. You can dip and move around the front of the barrel in the ultrasonic cleaner, but I would never immerse the entire barrel of the pen in there. That's just asking for trouble. Don't leave it in there partially immersed either. Keep moving it, or you may get a burn in the plastic right on the part where the surface of the water is.

[hbquikcomjamesl]

I finally ran the green M200 dry this past weekend, and gave everything a thorough cleaning:

 

Cavitated the cap 2 cycles in plain water. Then blew on it, with my lips tight on the open end, until ink stopped seeping out around the clip.

 

Cavitated the nib several full cycles, at least two beyond the point where no visible ink was leaching out into the water.

On 2/4/2025 at 6:18 PM, Dillo said:

You can dip and move around the front of the barrel in the ultrasonic cleaner, but I would never immerse the entire barrel of the pen in there.

Filled the reservoir portion of the barrel full of water, and cavitated, as per Dillo's suggestion, working the piston up and down while cavitating. Then swabbed it out. Then repeated the cycle until I was no longer leaching ink residue into the water.

 

Then I broke the seal on the bottle of Conklin green, and filled it.

 

Then, after it was in my pocket a few minutes, I discovered the one place I hadn't wiped away the ink I'd blown out of the cap: the underside of the clip. Thankfully, I was wearing a white shirt, and Taccia Midori yields to swabbing with full-strength laundry bleach almost as readily as Sheaffer or Pelikan blue (and a bit more readily than Sheaffer black).

 

And that resolves the mold problem. Almost three and a half months after it first appeared. Except for flushing the contaminated Taccia Midori down the laundry tray, and filling the bottle full of laundry bleach.

[Paul-in-SF]

My First Pen Gunk -- a post and questions. 

 

The other day I got a couple of Parker Lady Duofolds as a pair of almost identical green marble with very wide bands. Anyway, they were in decent shape, all they needed to get working was to clean the old shellac off the sac nipple and put in new sacs. One I filled with Parker Washable Blue for an innocuous starting ink, everything worked fine. The other I filled with Monteverde California Teal, it leaked like mad. I emptied it and took it apart and cleaned and re-filled it, it leaked again.. So after cleaning it out and making sure the sac was intact, I tried a different ink, Franklin-Christoph Midnight Emerald, and there was this long glob hanging from the nib. I blobbed it off on a paper towel, and used a popsicle stick I had to swirl around the ink bottle, and managed to bring up another glob. Looks a lot like the one that @hbquikcomjamesl had in their photo above. 

 

Okay, so that ink goes into the garbage. Cleaning the pen should be okay, I think, I'll just throw away the sac, and clean the heck out of the nib and feed with what, ammonia? I think the section is ebonite, and if so I don't want to put it into water. Do I have to take the nib and feed out, to be double sure I'm getting it clean? I've never done that with a Lucky Curve feed. 

 

Also, do I need to worry about the first ink, the one that was leaking so badly? I never did find out why it was leaking, since the sac was intact; maybe I did a bad job putting the pressure bar back in. There wasn't any ink inside the barrel, it was just leaking out the nib. 

[Dillo]

11 minutes ago, Paul-in-SF said:

My First Pen Gunk -- a post and questions. 

 

Okay, so that ink goes into the garbage. Cleaning the pen should be okay, I think, I'll just throw away the sac, and clean the heck out of the nib and feed with what, ammonia? I think the section is ebonite, and if so I don't want to put it into water. Do I have to take the nib and feed out, to be double sure I'm getting it clean? I've never done that with a Lucky Curve feed. 

 

 

No ammonia in that pen. Pen plastics have relatively poor resistance to it. Do read a bit earlier in the thread on what you need to do. It's all laid out step by step earlier in this thread. There's a lot to read through, but all the information you need on this cleaning process is there.

[LizEF]

43 minutes ago, Paul-in-SF said:

Cleaning the pen

Start here:

 

[Paul-in-SF]

On 12/23/2024 at 10:08 AM, LizEF said:

Monteverde still caries the nickname Moldeverde.

 

Well, this I did not know, funny how YouTube ink reviewers never mention it. I have a fair few Monteverde inks. Any suggestion for prophylactic procedures for these, or should I just throw them out? 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Given that cavitation in an ultrasonic cleaner was recommended as a way to kill any fungus in the pen, I wonder if cavitating the bottle of ink a few cycles would have a similar effect?

[Paul-in-SF]

11 hours ago, Dillo said:

Do read a bit earlier in the thread on what you need to do. It's all laid out step by step earlier in this thread. There's a lot to read through, but all the information you need on this cleaning process is there.

 

I have read the thread, including your multi-step process. I may be wrong, but this seems focused mainly on modern pens. I wonder if the same issues apply to celluloid pens? That is, is celluloid any more resistant or vulnerable to those household cleaning anti-mold products than modern plastics? 

 

As I said, I don't want to put the section, containing the nib and feed, in any kind of long-term bath solution because I believe it is made of ebonite, which is likely to turn from shiny black to rusty brown if I do. Removing a Lucky Curve feed from a section is notoriously difficult, because it has to come out from the back instead of being knocked out through the front; so difficult that (I recently learned) repair people used to routinely cut off the Lucky Curve extension off the feed (something I am not interested in doing). 

 

Since no plastics are involved in the section/nib/feed unit. I think I will be safe blasting through it with a dilute ammonia solution through a bulb syringe, repeatedly, and then rinsing it all clean with water and a little dish soap, then pure water. As I said, the inside of the barrel and the other components were not involved as far as I can tell, since the sac was intact. 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Unless the section and feed are made out of either metal, natural rubber, or glass, of course they're made of some kind of plastics, i.e., some kind of organic polymer. Bakelite and Celluloid are plastics. So is melamine.

[Paul-in-SF]

58 minutes ago, hbquikcomjamesl said:

Unless the section and feed are made out of either metal, natural rubber, or glass, of course they're made of some kind of plastics, i.e., some kind of organic polymer. Bakelite and Celluloid are plastics. So is melamine.

 

For this pen, both the section and feed are ebonite or black hard rubber. 

[LizEF]

1 hour ago, Paul-in-SF said:

Well, this I did not know, funny how YouTube ink reviewers never mention it. I have a fair few Monteverde inks. Any suggestion for prophylactic procedures for these, or should I just throw them out? 

Shake them up about once per month.  Keep your home free of mold.  Practice good pen hygiene.  Reduce the amount of time ink is exposed to air.

 

IMO, the problem is exaggerated online.  I would not throw them out unless they exhibit signs of "infection".  FTR: I've never had mold in my inks.  Don't plan on starting.   And yes, I have Monteverde samples and one bottle of it (recently purchased).

[LizEF]

1 hour ago, hbquikcomjamesl said:

Given that cavitation in an ultrasonic cleaner was recommended as a way to kill any fungus in the pen, I wonder if cavitating the bottle of ink a few cycles would have a similar effect?

That's an interesting idea.  Wish I had me a microbiologist who specializes in mold at hand.  (Too bad all these questions are coming up five years after I quit working at a microbiology lab.  )

[LizEF]

1 hour ago, Paul-in-SF said:

As I said, I don't want to put the section, containing the nib and feed, in any kind of long-term bath solution because I believe it is made of ebonite, which is likely to turn from shiny black to rusty brown if I do. Removing a Lucky Curve feed from a section is notoriously difficult, because it has to come out from the back instead of being knocked out through the front; so difficult that (I recently learned) repair people used to routinely cut off the Lucky Curve extension off the feed (something I am not interested in doing).

Do you not have an ultrasonic?  A cycle in one of those is usually about 2 minutes...