What Liquefied This Sac?

[Shaporama]

  On 3/21/2013 at 4:45 AM, pengoddess said:

I still think that there is an issue at times with different inks combining and causing a problem. It is almost impossible to rinse a pen 100% clean, there's always a little hint of some color of ink left lurking in the sac regardless of how many times you rinse it out.

 

Let's see - if I caught all the different posts, this pen has had the following inks inside it with the same sac of unknown origins: Sheaffer Skrip Blue, Aurora Blue and Noodler's Black. Also whatever ink Ron used to test the pen when he originally restored it.

 

How old was that Skrip Blue? Sheaffer had some problems recently with Slovenian production of Skrip that I believe is resolved now, but if it was a "current" production bottle of Skrip Blue, it might have had an issue. If it was "vintage" Sheaffer blue, perhaps something had gone off in that. What other pens had been filled from those bottles of Skrip Blue, Aurora Blue and Noodler's Black - did they have any leftover ink that could have been introduced unknowingly into the bottles?

 

I use all of these inks and a bunch of others, too. The only sacs I personally have seen melt down were from "that" bad sac batch a few years ago (let's not go there!) and that was limited to Snorkels.

 

I've been using Noodler's Black since BEFORE it was even introduced to the public in all sorts of pens with sacs and all sorts of other filling systems and I just haven't seen any issues with it.

 

We need to analyze further and not jump to conclusions about this

 

Sam

 

I can tell you that Ron restored two pens for me at the same time, one is the snorkel in question. Both were subsequently inked with Sheaffer Skrip - Blue. It was a new bottle, I've returned to using fountain pens in just the last year so I know that the ink was fresh. The other pen, also a snorkel, is healthy and has become a part of my regular rotation. I am confident we can eliminate the Skrip and the sac as factors here.

[Indy_Pen_Dance]

One other issue that should be mentioned about these "boutique" inks. Because they are heavily saturated with dyes, they will also clog the ink delivery system of the pen. (feed, breather tubes, tine slits and sacs) Just in the last month we have several clients send in pens that will not write or loose their flow. All of these have been because the ink had basically gummed up the works and they were always "boutique" or red inks. Several sessions of soaking, flush and ultrasonic treatments are needed to get things flowing again after the nib, feed and section had been disassembled. If you search around you will find that several professional restorers will not warranty work when certain brands of inks are used.

[psfred]

I just pulled two melted diaphragms out of "51" vacs today. Both had Noodler's inks (Ottoman Azure and Polar Blue), but I don't fault the ink. I've had diaphragms melt in pens that were never filled, and I have a 1954 Snorkel with an original sac that had Noodler's ink in it for a couple years and it's fine.

 

We shall have to see, I suppose, but I just can't see there being anything in the ink that would melt a good latex sac.

 

Peter

[FarmBoy]

Phenol based dyes would give latex a run for the money. The Latex formulation is also at play.

[Fiddlermatt]

I heard back from Noodler's; here is a copy of the email they sent me. I guess that's really all they can say.

 

 

Hi Matthew,

 

I am going to speak with Nathan about this and get back to you. However, Noodler’s Black will not react with rubber in that manner. So I suspect that the culprit is something else, but we will let you know.

 

Best Regards,

 

Dick

[ethernautrix]

I'm glad I prefer c/c to sacs. I can't vouch for other colors or brands, but I've experienced zero problems with Noodler's Black in the five years I've been using it in any of my pens regardless of filling system - no clogged feeds, no destroyed innards.

 

I like other black inks - such as J. Herbin to name one - but no other black ink has been as trouble-free in the pen as well as on the paper.

 

Hrm....

[psfred]

I have only had one lever filler sac melt, although I'm not a big user of them at the moment. Just found at #16 I replaced on an Estie section but didn't install due to a missing J-bar, and it's gummy and cracking. It was sitting on the windowsill in a clear plastic box, but the #18 sac next to it is fine.

 

The only other latex parts I've had fail are #14 sacs in Snorkels and Debutant sized Parker Diaphragms. Some, as noted, died in the pens unused, others croaked after being filled with Noodler's ink, but since the only other inks I've every used are Hero 402 Blue-Black, Scrip Blue-Black (Slovenian) and Hero 403 Blue, it's hard to say.

 

I've had one "51" filled for about 4 years with Polar blue and nary an issue, another one turned to slime on the first fill of Polar blue.

 

Since only some of my pens display this behavior, I'm inclined to think it's the sacs, not the ink. If it were the ink, it would happen every time, and I've had Noodler's Black in a Snorkel now for almost 5 years continuously, and it's fine.

 

Peter

[Ron Z]

I will stand by my comments. I see a lot more pens than most folks do, and lately a lot more melted sacs. So has Richard, Jim Baer, David Nishimura to name a few. The common thread that we have noted is that a significant part of the time a boutique ink has been used in the pen. Hard to conclude otherwise when the same model pens were restored at the same time, with the same brand of sacs from the same batch and only the pen in which boutique ink was used failed.

Edited March 26, 2013 by Ron Z

[Bill Wood]

I would imagine that Brian Gray from Edison is watching this thread carefully. He of course has the new pneumatic fillers. Great modern pens with a vintage filling system. I'm certainly not saying that these pens will fail. Not at all. But as a test group, a lot of those pens are out there and no doubt, using boutique inks. We'll have to see. Certainly not wishing anything bad on users by any stretch. Sorry about that pen. That sac was demolished in a short period of time. Scary actually.

[ShallowJam]

  On 3/25/2013 at 11:26 PM, Ron Z said:

I will stand by my comments. I see a lot more pens than most folks do, and lately a lot more melted sacs. So has Richard, Jim Baer, David Nishimura to name a few. The common thread that we have noted is that a significant part of the time a boutique ink has been used in the pen. Hard to conclude otherwise when the same model pens were restored at the same time, with the same brand of sacs from the same batch and only the pen in which boutique ink was used failed.

 

While I have no way to prove this argument one way or the other, and you certainly have more experience with pens than I, I will raise a question.

 

Many of the melted sacs had 'boutique inks' (I'm not exactly sure what that phrase means, but I understand that Noodler's is one of them) but we have no idea of how many people are using noodlers. Noodler's is a very popular brand of ink, so is it not possible that the reason many pens with failed sacs are filled with noodler's is because many pens in general are filled with noodler's? The question we need to be asking, is: are the amount of pens with failed sacs with boutique inks proportionally larger than the number of pens using boutique inks in general?

 

for example, if 65% of pens are using boutique inks, and 70% of pens that have failed sacs are using boutique inks, this is not statistically significant. If 95% of failed sac pens are using boutique inks, this is a little better, but we have no way of knowing how many people in general are using boutique inks, so saying that the ink is the issue is really a challenge.

 

Do boutique inks cause a sac failure 100% of the time? No. This means that the ink is not the sole cause of the problem. The sac is almost certainly part of the problem, seeing as these two are the main two conditions at play. However, there are many other variables that we probably haven't even thought of, such as a chemical reaction with the metal on the inside of a snorkel sac protector, or the type of talc being used, or the chemical composition of that person's tap water, or the amount of sun exposure, or the amount of body heat, etc.

 

What I'm trying to say I guess, is that the inks are quite clearly not the sole cause of the problem and we should be careful of how we read into our statistical analyses.

[ethernautrix]

I wouldn't mind giving up most Noodler's inks, but the black is my favorite black ink, and it isn't even the DARKEST. Hrm.... This is distressing.

[welch]

We need to turn the OK / Not OK meaning around to fit ordinary practice in testing products.

In quality assurance, one failure counts more than one success. My old company had to pull a featured product, a file transfer system that had passed our internal testing. We commercialized it. When customers got it, we found that the system successfully transferred about nine out of every ten files. The nine successes counted far less than the failure. If fifteen people have put a micro-brew ink into their P51 and only one failed, it does not prove, or even hint, that the sac is the culprit. It suggests that something is wrong with the ink.

 

We've been putting a new system through user acceptance test for about a week...a rough week during which random messages at unpredictable times go into a black hole. Over the weekend, 93 messages went through OK. One got rejected. One out of a batch of four messages from the same bank. The other three were processed on time. This one got bounced. That's a failure, and the engineers on the receiving system are working double-shifts to figure out the problem.

 

To repeat: 93 OK, one rejected. Other unexlained failures last week. The head of treasury said, softly, "I'm not prepared to let this system pass UAT".

 

(Note on my ink preferences: I use Private Reserve blues and Tanzanite; Diamine Sapphire, Imperial, Majestic, and Midnigt blues; Asa-gao. Also some "real" Skrip (box advertises the Snorkel) and Quink blue and blue-black with Solv-X. I love that Quink smell. The only Noodlers I use is Blue Eel; I dislike most Noodlers blues. I write mostly with Parker 51s and Parker 61s.)

[psfred]

Well, computer system are a bit different than latex sacs. One must ascertain a failure mode before one can determine fault and correction, after all.

 

I certainly will not argue with professional pen restorer's comments, I see only my own pens, but in MY experience I'm having sac or diaphragm failures that do not appear to be firmly linked with the ink used. As I said, it's a bit difficult for me to tell as I use mostly Noodler's inks, but I've had several sac failures in pens that never saw ink from when I put the new sac in and when I tried to fill it some time later (yes, I have too many pens). Debutant sized diaphragms, #14 standard sacs for Snorkels, and just yesterday I found a #16 sac that had gone bad when never inked.

 

As noted above, I'd personally suspect the sac before the ink (or strictly for myself, the fact that I've used baby powder in the past to install sacs, against better advice, with the predictable result!) because I'm getting random failures. If a sac fails in a pen with Noodler's ink, but a sac from the same manufacture in a similar pen does not, which is the cause, the ink or the sac?

 

So far all the Vacumatic's I've restored with standard size diaphragms are working nicely several years on -- but I only use Skrip Blue-Black in them.

 

I'll try some new diaphragms this week and refill with Polar Blue and see what happens.

 

Peter

Edited March 26, 2013 by psfred

[FarmBoy]

The test is actually rather simply done. Someone (actually a lot of someones) needs to cut a sac into three parts. Place one piece in an empty jar, one in a boutique ink, and the final piece in a non-boutique ink suchas Quink. Ideally the boutique ink would be from a bottle used in a pen that generated a goo sac.

 

This of course only tests the sac against wet ink as opposed to dried ink and eliminates any pen related causes.

[NeilS]

To add to the required test method to ensure best practice.

 

1)Use both sac material and hard rubber i.e. a feed in each sample (as feed deterioration has also been reported)

2)ensure all samples are in the dark, UV is a known source of latex failure.

3)Samples to be open to the air but not each other, Evaporation will concentrate the base within the solution raising the pH. I think this is most likely the mechanism at the root of the problem

4) Allow the two ink samples to completely dehydrate

 

Hopefully that would prove it once and for all, but I would assume the ink manufacturers would have done something like this prior to placing it on the market.

[reval]

I would applaud such a public test, so that we finally confirm or debunk this.

 

I've used several boutique inks (I hate that term) in pens with sacs without any problems, so my guess is that those inks do not cause any harm.

[NeilS]

Well, if someone cares to send me a sample of one (or more) of the main suspects (i.e. Noodlers Bay state Blue or similar) I will do it. I have only Waterman's and Diamine but they would provide a good comparison. I think I have a scrap feed I can cut into three and have plenty of sacs.

 

I think I might change the experiment parameters slightly by placing the control in deionized water and limiting the evaporation rate to aim for a 3 month exposure. If the mechanism is extended exposure to the concentrated ink uncontrolled evaporation would not satisfactorily replicate it.

[reval]

I can send you a sample vial of BSB and Legal Lapis (a bulletproof ink).

[coyotewhisper]

Whenever a problem like this is posted, the ink is to blame. What ensue after that is urban legends, hysteria breaks out that culprit ink brand was to blame. In some cases the ink could have played a small part. Like Pendemonium Sam, mentioned there many factors to consider. This sack has had numerous inks in it. That many inks could have had a reaction, it was not the fault of one ink. Possibly pen hygiene has played a part in the sack premature failure.

Will we ever really know the actual cause of the sacks failure no. I think it is irresponsible to blame the ink brand as the main culprit. I know there are many Noodler's defectors on this broad many blame the ink brand for all sorts of problems. I think we need to be more cautious when a problem arises to blame a specific ink brand before considering other factors too.

[Richard]

I'm afraid I have to chime in here on the side of Ron. I have seen sacs that I installed turn to goo in less than two years, and this has happened only in pens that were filled with Noodler's ink.

 

To make matters worse, I know that it's not the "gooey sac problem" that has occurred a couple of times with sacs from one certain vendor. (The gooey sac problem occurs when the latex vendor supplies the material without a critical component called a metal inhibitor. The metal inhibitor is there to prevent the sac from turning to goo when it is kept in contact with metal, such as a pressure bar.)

 

I have seen the problem in pens that have no pressure bars, specifically bulb-filling New Postal Pens from my own Gate City Pen Company. I have not seen this problem in any New Postal Pen that was not used with Noodler's ink.

 

The inescapable conclusion is that the ink caused the sac failure.