Diamine bottle sized holder and your new gadget

[inkstainedruth]

17 hours ago, Carguy said:

I might need to find some of these Vectors. All I have is one Tweety and Sylvester.

I didn't like the Tweety Bird ones when I saw them for sale (some of the Looney Toons ones have multiple designs).  I had gotten the first Tasmanian Devil one for a friend (because she NEEDED it , but then found the other design -- which I actually liked BETTER -- when I decided I needed one for myself a few years later).  

Was just using the Sylvester one this morning, after refilling it with Noodler's 41 Brown.  The weird thing, of course, is that when I got that pen the seller said that the packaging was in German (it was apparently NOS).  And I was curious about what the packaging said (once I took the NYS German Regents exam in high school I kinda made a concerted effort to forget everything i'd learned -- two years in middle school and three in high school).  So plugged some of the text into Google Translate -- only to find that it wasn't German at ALL (like the seller had thought):  it was DUTCH!    So I definitely kept the packaging on that one....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[ScottT]

On 11/14/2025 at 10:39 PM, inkstainedruth said:

@encremental -- Those definitely look interesting.  

But also is making me think of the "hacks" I've used to stabilize sample vials when filling pens from them.  One is to get some sort of brass gadget (I think they're plumbing connectors of some sort -- that have have a tube attached to what looks like a a fairly thick hex nut).  The hex nut acts as a weight to stabilize the tube, which is just wide enough for a sample vial to fit in.

The other (which I'm still trying to figure out how to make them really work best) is to use the plastic clips that come on the spray bottles of some of my allergy medications (to keep the sprayer head on the cap from going off when not in use).  They're -- again -- about the same diameter to fit around a sample vial, and have a little piece that sticks out opposite to the opening of the curved parts, and I've collected a number of them over the years when the spray bottles are empty -- I just have to figure out what the best way to stack a couple of them up and and how to glue them together to make a stack of them a bit more stable since i don't know what adhesive would work the best.  I have a small ziplock bag full of the clips at this point, and they don't seem to be marked in such a way that I know whether they are recyclable, like the medication bottles are (around here, we can now only recycle plastic containers and jars that are labeled as being grade #1 or #2 inside a little triangle).

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

 

I have had great luck using the base from a set of dinky dips I bought long ago.  Quick search shows they are here https://www.paperinkarts.com/dinkydsc.html  and here https://www.johnnealbooks.com/product/small-screw-top-dinky-dip .  The size you want is the small, and the sample vials fit just like the wee vials that are included.  Pretty solid perch for them, at least that is my finding.  Hope this helps.

 

[inkstainedruth]

I have picked up a number of sample vial holders over the years for storage purposes (I was trying to sort the sample vials by color, but am too far behind on the charts of what ink is where (and of course have a lot of samples I haven't even tried yet).  The ones I bought are plastic and are easy to put together, and hold up to 60 vials at a time.

But for actually filling a pen from a vial?  The brass pipe connectors like these work extremely well (sorry about the image size -- can't figure how to shrink it down).  I'm using the ones that have IIRC the half-inch diameter tubes.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth