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Showing results for tags 'freezing'.
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Having recently moved from central California to central Minnesota, we've discovered that we need to pay attention to things here that were never an issue there. Like inks and cold weather. We arrived in mid-August here, and most of our worldly possessions remain in unheated storage. There was just no room to bring much into our current temporary residence ("we're living in our kids' attic, why do you ask?") until my son-in-law and I (and several friends on occasion) finished the addition above the kitchen. Finally enough room to bring in some of my pens, inks and paper. What we hadn't considered was that our belongings had been subjected to somewhat lower temperatures than we were used to before. In this case, low- to mid-20s, a couple nights down around 0º or so. Here's what we discovered: - Most ink survived being frozen and thawed out just fine. Shaking the bottles briskly before using didn't hurt in a couple of cases. - A full bottle of Diamine Burnt Sienna shattered. Several boxes of various sorts got bathed in the ink as it thawed out. It didn't help that that happens to be one of my wife's very favorite inks. Note to self: if this happens in the future for some reason, inspect all ink bottles while still frozen hard, before any broken bottles can thaw out. Fortunately, all my inks were packed in a plastic storage bin, so the notebooks and other fp paper were not bathed in the flood. - Most ink in cartridges came through just fine. The only exceptions being a couple of Platinum cartridges that were very full; the ink expanded on freezing, popping the ball bearing out of the top of the cartridge. As the ink hadn't escaped the cartridges, mostly, I was able to press the ball bearing back into the top of the cartridges affected, and the two I've started using work just fine. Fortunately, none of my vintage or expensive pens were packed in the box with the ink and paper. I'm not very optimistic that old celluloid or styrene pen bodies would fare well in the cold.