Vintage pens are something we are passionate about here at Cardinal Pens & Paper. After all, it's how we started. With that in mind, Let's take a few minutes to talk about care and use of your vintage pen.
One of the most important guidelines to follow is ink selection. Many vintage pens are self filling, that is, they fill either directly into the barrel, or they utilize a latex or other type of sac inside the barrel to hold the ink. This means they are not as easy to clean as your typical modern caartridge or converter pen. Also, a majority of vintage pens are not designed to be disassembled for cleaning, and while some pens (Esterbrook, for example) did utilize a threaded nib unit, it is not necessary, nor is it recommended, to disassemble a vintage pen just to clean it. Many of these pens are 70-100 years old and excessive disassembly risks damaging the pen. Many require special pen specific tools to disassemble as well.
With that being said, it is obvious the first suggestion is to never use an ink with shimmer or any kind of particles in it. It will be incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to get all the particles out of the pen, nib, and feed. Also avoid heavily pigmented inks, or any inks that are difficult to clean out of a pen. Some permanent inks will fall into this category. While a popular ink for modern pens, we do not recommend Pilot's Iroshizuku inks as they are somewhat akaline and have been proven to degrade atex sacs over time.
We recommend using Waterman inks for your vintage pen. They have been proven to be safe for the filling systems, non-staining to translucent barrel and visulasted sections, and are extremely easy to clean. Just about every major pen repair expert uses and recommends Waterman for these reasons.
We also like Parker and Sheaffer inks as well. While we have not tested every ink on the market with vintage pens we do know what has worked well. You might discover vintage inks such as old Sheaffer Skrip which is often found in antique stores to work well, provided there is no precipatate in the bottle.
We know that limiting your selection of inks for vintage pens may seem boring to some, but it will benefit you in the long run.
Cleaning your vintage pen can be more cumbersome than a traditional cartridge converter filler, but it doesn't have to be. If you have chosen your ink selection wisely, it shouldn't be much more time consuming than cleaning your other modern pens. Resist the urge to see that your pen be 110% running clean and clear when cleaning. Excessive and over use of the filling system (lever, vacumatic, snorkel, etc.) can damage the filling system. We recommend sticking to minimal color changes of ink, so there will be no color shift from one color to the next. Pick one color you like for that particular pen and stick with it. Keep your modern pens for changing color as often as you wish!
When cleaning, we recommend using a non-ammonia based pen flush for any vintage pen with an internal sac or gold nib. Ammonia has been shown to destroy latex and damage gold nibs over time. While our normal pen flush uses a nominal amount of ammonia (approximately 3.5% versus other brand's 10%) better to be safe than sorry! Only use ammonia based for pens with steel nibs and without latex sacs.
Be sure to check back soon as we will be adding How To videos on filling and cleaning various vintage pens!
