How to look after your pen

With a bare minimum of looking-after by the owner, even a crummy pen should serve for a decade or two (this or this are at a very low end of pen-hood, and both are working well today, at least forty years after their production-- the latter even spent some time in a toy chest in the 1950s!).

Regular Washing: This was my main mistake as a preteen fountain pen user-- I never put anything but ink through my poor school-day Sheaffer cartridge pens, and thus had to frequently replace them.

"Just a second... isn't ink supposed to go in pens?" Indeed so, as oil is supposed to go in engines, but every three months or so one should probably do a little cleaning to ensure performance. Ink is basically water with colour in it, and the colour tends to stick to the tiny interior parts of the pen, until eventually it stops coming out. This can take a long time, mind you, so even if you haven't attended to this in a while it might not be obvious that the pen craves a cleaning.

For proper cleaning, you will want a cup or bowl of clean, cool water. Whatever comes out the cold tap is probably just fine-- if you live somewhere with highly mineralized water or some wonkily extreme pH, consider bottled. The pen should be empty, and applying a paper towel to the point to draw out as Pen resting it's point on moist paper towel.

Pen resting it's point on moist paper towel.

much ink as possible is a good idea. For an pen with a built-in filler, you should now fill the pen with water. The more vigourous filling systems (lever, button, vacuum and pneumatic) actually self-clean a little when filled with ink, as the fluid rages backwards up the channels of the pen. Empty and fill the pen a couple of times, the ideal being to have water come out the same colour it went in. If you're working with a Vacumatic or a vacuum filler, there's some extra instructions you should have a look at. If you have a pen which uses cartridges, you should look into getting an ear-cleaning syringe-- this sounds sinister, but it's really just a little rubber bulb. For about $2 at the drug-store, you've got a tool that can blast a jet of water through the feed of a pen when applied thus, and you can also contemplate how many people must damage their ears through over-enthusiastic application of the thing while you're at it. I should hope I don't have to point out that this should be done over something you don't mind getting wet, like a sink or an empty cup.

Sensible Exercise: While keeping the pen clean is important, it is a much easier task if the pen is in regular use. A pen is for writing, and unless it's some amazingly rare exemplar or in extremely feeble shape, there's not reason you shouldn't write with it. However, as in human exercise there is a difference between a bracing walk and marching to relieve Fort Zinderneuf, all writing surfaces are not equal.

Pursuing the Foreign Legion motif for a moment, sand and other abrasive materials should be kept off the writing surface. The paper itself is also worth considering. I will admit, quietly, that for writing on newsprint, a ball point is superior to a fountain pen-- but cheap calls to cheap. Because the tines flex in the act of writing, even in a very stiff pen, the point can act like a pair of tiny tweezers, picking up fibres from the paper. On low-cost, loosely-knit papers like newsprint, this can build in short order into a notable pad of inky fuzz of the nibs-- while the effect does occur in better papers, such fibres as are picked up are usually redeposited again shortly afterwards. I should mention at this point that elite-grade, hand-laid 100% linen paper, while nice, is not required-- all the writing samples on this site are done on a Hilroy brand writing tablet, which I bought at the corner drug-store for about $2.50. If it’s paper you’d put down an inkjet printer, you can use it for writing on.

The quick cure for a fuzz-wodge stuck in the pen is to draw a line on some better paper with a firm hand-- the tines flex, the wodge tumbles out, and life goes on. If the wodge manages to get in between the feed and the point, you may have to resort to dental floss-- the real thing, unwaxed, and with great care, as you do not want that lump getting stuck way up under the feed.

The other advantage of regularly exercising the pen is that you are also exercising the arm muscles involved in writing, accommodating your body to the task and improving the resulting text. For hints on specific writing improvement, have a look at the writing section on the "how to" page and the links page.

Diet: There are a lot of very pretty inks out in the world. Some of them are formulated to go into a fountain pen. Others have lacquers and chunky pigments and all manner of things which don't go through a fountain pen the right way and will stay inside as long as they can possibly manage. So, avoid at all costs India Ink (Pelikan makes a "Fount-India" that is like India Ink, but won't kill your pen instantly. They claim. I can't say I'd trust it with a pen I loved). Frankly, avoid any ink that doesn't specifically say it CAN go in a fountain pen. Most safe inks will be transparent in the bottle, so if you tilt the bottle so the ink washes up the side you can check in a rough way. However, some dramatically unsafe inks are also transparent-- this is not a sure test.

I have had no trouble with:	I have had great trouble with
J. Herbin inks Manuscript Calligraphy Parker Quink Pelikan 4001 Noodler's (with a small note of caution below) Sheaffer Skrip (but there's a comment below) Waterman Ink	Calli (which I think no longer suggests it can be used in fountain pens-- in a dip pen, it's brilliant stuff) Windsor & Newton Drawing Inks (actually, I had no problems, since I never put them in a fountain pen, but they would really cause trouble. Trust me.)

It is possible for ink to go moldy-- apparently there's something in the mix of water, ammonia and pigment that mold can get a grip on, giving us some hope of finding life on the Jovian moons. This is only a problem for inks that have been around for a while in an open bottle (I'd take a good long look at a 50 year old unopened bottle, myself, but some swear by it). My sole issue with Skrip arises from a bottle I opened about ten years ago and then used very infrequently. It's still about half-full, but some of that half is a fuzzy mat of something horrible. Because it was a bottle of black, I didn't realize a feed problem I was having lay in the ink rather than the pen until one day a strand of gunk came up on the point of the pen I'd just filled. It is possible to filter these inks, using a fine metal mesh as is used for camp-stove fuel, but that won't get out the spores. Pens put into that ink can become a vector to other bottles of ink, perpetuating the problem. You can get a fungicide meant for use in ink here if you're worried about this as a problem. Moldy inks, properly skimmed, are entirely safe for dip pens, if you're that way inclined.

You might think that cartridges would be the perfect answer to this sort of concern, and as far as the mold issue you would be entirely correct. However, cartridges are a poor solution to long-term ink storage, as they are made of a soft plastic which keeps the dry portions of the ink in place indefinitely but allows the wet to escape over time. I have a dozen Wearever cartridges, still in a blister-pack, from the late 1950s which contain only powder. In theory, adding water to one of these mummies would bring it back to life, but in practice some chunks might remain undissolved to cause clogs.

A final note on inks: while less so commonly than in ages past, pen makers are sometimes also ink makers, and they would like you to use only their ink in their pens. Don't worry about it. While there are some exotic inks that don't entirely agree with specific pens-- I've heard that inks made by Private Reserve are occasionally a bit too rich for some pens to feed well, for example, and my direct experience with Noodler's is that there's a LOT of pigment in them which causes a couple of pens trouble, but there's also a lot of flow-enhancers in them which means they come out too readily in other pens-- it's the general case that ink made to go down a fountain pen will go down any fountain pen. Herbin has been making inks and no pens since 1670, and they seem to be getting along all right with people who have disregarded the maker's brand. Some will also suggest that after a year or two sitting on your shelf, the ink will begin to thicken and degrade, so you should buy more. Most pen fanciers disagree. If you want to see how much passion the subject of inks can provoke, the internet can of course provide.

Fresh Air: If storing a pen for a while, clean and dry is the ticket-- a pen left lying around with ink in it is a pen which will eventually have a mass of dried ink inside it. This is inconvenient in terms of later cleaning, and can, if the pen uses a rubber ink sac, lead to the destruction of the reservoir.

Even when the pens are blamelessly empty, they shouldn't be sealed up. The sulfur involved in the rubber components of some of them can discolour celluloid plastics, an effect called "ambering", or "amberizing" by some who like extra syllables (for an example of the effect, see here). The more concentrated the fumes, the more pronounced the effect, and it does have bearing on the value of a vintage pen. I personally work to minimize the amount of sulfurous rubber in my collection, retrofitting modern silicon sacs where possible, keep pens in a box with a loose lid, and have started to segregate the few pens which won't have a silicon sac (which, happily, are of more modern plastics which don't care a bit).

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