Dry as a bone.....

[mookie2112]

So....I've noticed with some of my pens, no matter what I do, they just remain "dry as a bone". I try flossing with a brass sheet, I try doing SBREBrown's "making a pen wetter in seconds" trick, and even still, it seems some pens are dry. For me, I notice it's mostly stubs, but I have some Waterman Philias that just want to remain dry.

I feel like taking out the feed, and getting a dremel tool and making the channel in the feed deeper. Would that help?

Any suggestions?

[Pterodactylus]

Modifying the feed for sure can make a pen wetter.

Did you already tried to change the ink and using a wetter ink?

[mookie2112]

Yes. My dryest ink is LAMY Blue.....everything else compared to that is very flowing. I like Diamine and DeAtramentis.

[D Armstrong]

Heh. Lets not be hasty. In adjusting thousands of pens, I've only run into one which needed surgery on the feed. There are a lot of other factors involved which need to be checked out first, all on each pen.

Leaving the nib and feed, when did you last flush the pens? Is there any chance that there is ink residue in the channel leading from the ink reservoir to the feed itself? Is there a breather tube inside the reservoir which might be obstructed, causing a vacuum which could interfere with flow?

The first place to start in examining the nib and feed system is with the tine alignment, looked at under magnification. Is the tipping even on both sides, and does the slit down the middle meet perfectly, viewed at all angles? How tightly does the tipping press together?

The second is the slit. Does it evenly narrow as it progresses from the stress-relief (often erroneously referred to as the "breather") hole to the tipping? Are there any points along its length where it widens and then narrows again? That will kill your ink flow. Do the tines hump upwards anywhere along their length (which can affect contact with the feed)? Are the tines aligned along their length, or is one slightly higher than the other?

Re-sizing the slit in the feed is a bit like putting a larger gas line on your car: it will increase the amount of gas getting to the motor, but that might cause more problems than you intend.

First step: examine thoroughly.

Second step: clean thoroughly.

Third step: send it to someone with experience.

(Third step, optional: buy lots of pens and practice on them, wreck them, slowly learn to fix them, then rescue pens for the rest of your life.)

[jar]

One other thing to check is the gap between the feed and the nib. Try sliding a piece of paper between the bottom of the nib and the top of the feed and tell us what happens.

[Woody]

As Jar mentioned try testing the gap. After that run a brass shim down the centre of the feed. That will open the ink channel just a bit. Not too much. A little at a time.

[KrazyIvan]

"Mostly stubs"

If a stub is a dry writer, are you holding it possibly with the nib rotated in a bit? Stubs like to be held at a certain angle to write correctly. I know with my own stubs I tend to turn the nib to the left as I am writing. It tends to make the pen write dry and I have to remember to rotate the pen back to the correct position. It does not happen as much with pens that force you to hold the pen in the correct writing position like the Lamy Safari. It's one of the reasons I may try an oblique nib but it does not bother me enough to get one up to this point. :)

[Woody]

"Mostly stubs"

If a stub is a dry writer, are you holding it possibly with the nib rotated in a bit? Stubs like to be held at a certain angle to write correctly. I know with my own stubs I tend to turn the nib to the left as I am writing. It tends to make the pen write dry and I have to remember to rotate the pen back to the correct position. It does not happen as much with pens that force you to hold the pen in the correct writing position like the Lamy Safari. It's one of the reasons I may try an oblique nib but it does not bother me enough to get one up to this point. :)

I do the same as you Ivan. My stubs are always smoothed on the left corner, so when the stub is rolled to the left there's still contact with the paper with some line variation. You may want to try that. It makes a big difference for myself.

[stub]

a couple o' things can inhibit flow:

1. Surface tension in the converter. (doesn't sound like that in this case)

2. Feed

3. Nib

Feed. If it is ebonite you can deepen the feed with an exacto knife. If it is plastic you can't really. Plastic feeds have to be etched and by scoring the feed with a razor you are deepening or widening the channel but also removing the surface texture of the feed which is likely etched at the factory. So you might be doing more to inhibit the flow than improve it. Some smarty pants people have tricks for resurfacing the hacked plastic feeds but I don't know what those are. Hurray for ebonite.

Feed. Can just be blocked. You'd be shocked at how hard it can be to unblock a feed if the ink dried up and really adhearse to the sides.

Feed. Nib has to be alligned correctly with the feed. Feed and nib have to be properly seated. You can heat set ebonite feeds. Hurray for ebonite. People try to heat set plastic feeds. I am not sure that has the effect they intened. heh.

Nib. It is astonishing, a never ending source of wonder to me, exactly how clamp-tight tines can be. I had an Aurora 88 come to me in a trade that you was just mystifying the 2 tines were so tight. You can shim and squeeze till the cows come home and nothing. It was a beast of a nib, very thick and the tines were so tight that you couldn't see the nib slit without a loupe. I thought that they had accidentally forgot to cut the slit. It was an enormous amount of work to even one brass sheet in there and leaving that in there did amost nothing. When you pulled the sheet out the nib snapped shut again and the pen litereally would not write. Shims don't alway do that much and they can deform your nib if you go overboard and try to stick 19 sheets of brass in there. ha ha.

Desperate messures. If you are like me and live 6000 miles from any nib miester. Don't have a lot of resources. Don't have a lot of patients. (be honest). You can (at your own risk) mylar the nib slit and that will open things up. You aren't supposed to do that. You aren't supposed to jaywalk either. Pull the nib. Get the lowest grit mylar. Hold the mylar taught. Slide it in the nib slit. rub and dub dub a few times. Flip the pen over. Rub and dub dub again. I had to mylar the living fuck out the A 88. The tines were under so much pressure there was just no other way. But in most cases a little will go a long way. You can't undo it so be careful.

I never told you to do this. This message will now self-destruct.

[Chi Town]

I do the EXACT same thing as Krazy Ivan; I roll my pens back to the left when writing! I have leaned to send my favorite pens out to a nibmeister, and have a Left hand Oblique installed on them. Then the pens write like pudding, or in other words, smooth as silk.......I'm getting ready to strat grinding my own nibs........

[mookie2112]

I'm the OP, and in this particular pen, I replaced the converter (Jinhao) and it was fine. I wonder why the original converter was bad? Perhaps some kind of electro-static action? Kinda like when you rub a balloon on a rug....
that's the only thing I can think of. The converter itself looked fine.

The couple stubs I was referring to were TWSBI. I've since replaced the nib to a medium and all is fine. I've since purchased a few more stubs, and they write just fine.....

Thank you for all the suggestions!

[ac12]

If it is the converter, it could be surface tension trapping the ink in the back of the converter.
Some converters are worse than others about this.
The ink used will also affect the surface tension.