Originally Posted by
tandaina
But I do not own an ultrasonic cleaner or anything like that so I'm sure there is occasionally a drop or two. Especially in say the old lever fillers, actually I think I'm going to sell off the majority of those I have left partly because they are such a pain to get clean. :\
Here are a couple of tips for speeding up the process (also good for Vacumatics):
1. After flushing the pen a few times, fill it with water and invert it. Shake it to get the water to the rear of the sac. Then flush normally again. The principle here is that water doesn't reach the back of the sac effectively, so you're just chipping away at what's back there unless you invert the pen to make the water get there. Using a surfactant (e.g. Kodak Photo-Flo) or a pen flush helps a lot, but you still need to invert the pen to clean the back of the sac if you want things to go as quickly as possible.
2. Some inky water stays in the feed, so if you just flush, flush, flush, you're progressively diluting that. Consider removing more of it at intervals during the flushing. I need to make myself a salad-spinner centrifuge, but for now I just take a paper napkin, paper towel, or toilet paper, fold it and wrap the nib, feed, and grip section with it. Then I hold the pen and paper firmly while I shake it out like a thermometer. The inky water on the paper will tell you how close you are to having the pen clean. Then I resume flushing.
The last source of ink is common to most fountain pens, and it is hard to clean without an ultrasonic or perhaps a little soaking. This is ink that wicks into areas outside of the normal flow of ink/water such as above the nib. There's nothing special about lever fillers in this regard. The thermometer shake with absorbent paper helps with this, I think.
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