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Hi All,
I may have ruined my Montblanc 146 by using rubbing alcohol to remove dried up lavender purple ink from the reservoir. It now leaks (gushes almost) a lot from where I hold it to write. Could rubbing alcohol have cracked the resin barrel? Any suggestions/advise? Thank you in advance!
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Sorry but it will need to go to Montblanc for a level 1 service and they will probably replace the barrel, the feeder case and the piston.
Rubbing alcohol may easily have caused a hairline crack to open up, or may have caused the adhesive to degrade and therefore allow ink to leak around the feeder case/grip. :( It's not something that you should use on your fountain pens.
Alcohol in any form is detrimental to many of the materials pens are made from. There are various commercial ink removers and naphtha is useful for many cleaning tasks.
Sorry to hear about your pen. It's an easy mistake to make.
Feedback on alcohol for flushing out pens have been positive on most modern low priced pens. There's a pen made to take india-ink, it has stood up to more thorough cleaning methods. There isn't a lot of cases to go by and any experimenting always invovles some risk. With shellac sealings, and some glues alcohol will work as a solvent. Napha (a widely used term) isn't all safe either, it depens on the pen. If you can flush out your pen and leave it to dry out thoroughly slightly warped plastic/resin might settle back into previous shape. The hard resin they used these days should stand up to alcohol with out problems. Like mentioned you 146 might have some sealings or parts affected by the alchohol, and a nice pen like that should be sorted out.
Once you get things sorted, and should this happen again, you can remove dried ink residue easier with pen flush liquid (Goulet, Monteverde, etc.).
However, most of the time, I find that flushing and soaking with water usually takes care of things.
I flush with water and then fill pen with water, put pen nib down in enough water to cover the nib.
After a few hours I empty the pen and container and repeat the whole process until no more ink is left in the vial and no more comes out of the pen.
Thank you all very much for the feedback, suggestions and advice!
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