Originally Posted by
Jon Szanto
Another tip: if you move the lever, and don't feel a lot of resistance and/or cracking sounds, you may be ok. At this point, I would suggest the following...
Don't try to fill it with ink (you must have a bottle of ink at this point, right?). Fill a glass or container with water. When filling a lever-filler pen like this (and many others), you are going to dip the pen into the liquid (water, in this case) just past the end of the nib, just covering a little bit of the section (the black part on the Esterbrook that you'll hold the pen with when you write). Then you pull the lever forward, and you should notice some air bubbles come up, as the sac is pressed and the air squeezed out of it. Let the lever move back into it's flat position and hold the pen there for 5 or so seconds. This allows the sac to expand and draw the ink up through the nib.
Since it is used, move the pen over a sink or other container and then open the lever again. This should accomplish a couple things:
- it will expel the water. If it doesn't, that means no water got sucked up, and you probably have a sac with a leak (or worse) that needs replacing.
- if the water does expel, see if it is darkly (or even lightly) tinted with ink. If pens haven't be flushed, the addition of water will reconstitute any dried ink, sometimes almost as strong as regular ink. If water doesn't come out pretty darn clear, repeat the filling and expelling until the water is quite clear. This is how you flush the pen, and how you both keep old ink from getting mixed in your bottle of good ink, and also making sure that lovely bright pink ink you are loading doesn't turn brown because you've got the residue of green ink in the pen.
Hope that helps...
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