Fountain pens are known for smooth and crisp writing. Nevertheless, sometimes you may get literary pissed off with the quality of writing of your favorite fountain pen too. This usually happens when fountain pens write dry due to improper flow of ink from their ink cartridges.Such a problem can be solved by means of these tips. Watch them out.
- Flushing clean the cartridge
Most of the times, lack of ink flow from the fountain pen indicates that ink inside the cartridge has dried up. When this happens, dried up ink inside the pen tends to clog the feed system. Eventually, it disrupts the natural flow of ink. Situation like this demand that thorough cleaning of ink cartridge has to be done. For this, you would require some warm water to flush clean the feed. Running warm water through this feed will gradually flush out the small particles and dried up chunks of ink inside the cartridge, and encourage its smooth flow again.
- Priming the pen
This is the second step in the process of cleaning ink cartridge of fountain pen. Now the process of priming has to be carried out, which is different for different types of fountain pens. In case of cartridge converter style fountain pen, the ink itself can be primed. In cartridge style pens, the grid section has to be unscrewed and slight pressure has to be applied for pressing the ink out of the cartridge. In case of converter style pen, slightly twisting the converter will make the ink disappear.
- Select ink carefully
At the third stage, when the internal parts of the fountain pen have been thoroughly cleaned up, you need to refill it with ink again. Here, a vital advice is that you must be very choosy about the quality of ink that you select for the purpose. While most of the ordinary inks comprise of tiny suspended particles which tend to create clogging effect in the pen, there are some inks that come with self lubricating properties. Moreover, the consistency of ink also varies. While some are very dense, some might be too runny, and some others might have the right consistency that encourages smooth flow specifically in a fountain pen. Hence, adequate information on the variety of inks available for fountain pens has to be gathered while choosing the right product.
- Pay attention to nibs
Even after cleaning the feed and the cartridge, you might find that it writes a bit scratchy. If this happens, you need to investigate the nib of the pen immediately. If you find that it is a fine tipped nib then accept it that lack of ink flow to the tip makes this nib glide scratchily. If you do not like it, you have to replace it with a wider tipped nib.
