Dr Leighton Davies-Smith and fountain pen inks

[Chrissy]

Last weekend the Lone Star Pen Club hosted a meeting with Dr Leighton Davies-Smith as the speaker. His web-site Scribe technical consulting contains a couple of excellent documents well worth reading. He is the man who was originally behind Parker Penman Inks and has more recently designed a new set of similar inks called Scribe inks that have been reviewed in the Ink Review forum from samples generously sent by "junglejim."
Pen Realm (Kirk Speer) also now stocks this range of Scribe inks.

Dr Leighton was a most interesting speaker mainly because it quickly became clear that he knew almost everything there was to know about how fountain pen ink is made and how it works in pens. From the designing of the ink to the designing of the pens to ensure they work in harmony together as well as they can. Some of the information he showed to us is on his web-site and is well worth a read.

I'm only going to mention a couple of very interesting things that I learned.

1) The first was diluting ink that has become concentrated inside cartridges due to evaporation. We were talking about old Parker Penman cartridges at the time but many fountain pen users will have seen cartridges that are now half full because of age and evaporation.

Dr Leighton said that he cringes every time he sees a recommendation to add water to these cartridges using a syringe. I can hold up my hand and say I've done this and recommended it myself rather than just using the cartridge of now concentrated ink. However, Dr Leighton says that you've not only lost water through the plastic cartridge case, but you've also lost alcohol and bactericide. Therefore by adding only water you are diluting the original alcohol and bactericide levels and taking a higher risk of getting mould growing inside your pen. So he keeps a bottle of liquid containing water, alcohol and bactericide and uses that solution to reconstitute the remaining liquid in evaporated cartridges.

I mentioned that I had some isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol and 4% Natural Pigments phenol (carbolic acid) and he confirmed that adding some of both to the water before reconstituting the ink inside your cartridge would work better than just water. At that point we didn't discuss exact proportions but it's something I'm going to experiment with unless I can get more detailed information from Dr Leighton by email.

2) We moved along to the problem of transporting fountain pens on planes and were shown diagrams of how the ink level looks inside a fountain pen when clipped into your pocket. When you have ink plus air inside your pen, then the fins of the collector are doing their job and collecting some droplets of ink. If the pen goes on a plane then the air will expand and push the ink level down so that more ink goes into the collector. If that gets full then the excess will leak into the feed and pen cap.

The easiest way to prevent this from happening is to have as little air as possible in your pen filling mechanism. This means that there is less air to expand and the ink level won't be pushed further down into the collector.

So - before you fly either fill your pen as full as you can or travel with it almost empty so there isn't enough ink to fill the collector. Then it's unlikely to leak.