Diamine Registrars Painted My Pen

[martinbir]

I like iron gall inks but often find them too dry for my taste.

 

Recently I have had success with Diamine Registrars in a Pelikan M200. I tried a partial fill and when that was fine, carried on with a complete fill. The ink was in the pen for about 10 days and towards the end I noticed the ink window becoming obscured.

 

After washing you could see there were hard edged patches of an opaque film inside. Not staining as I have seen before, but almost as if someone had made a bad job of painting it.

 

Soap, cotton buds and effort have restored the pen but I am very surprised at something like this happening after such a short time.

 

Does anyone have any advice, please?

[yogalarva]

My guess (and this could be totally wrong, so take it with a grain of salt) is that a certain amount of the iron precipitated out inside your pen as air came in during use. This is probably pretty normal, since I think you wind up with iron precipitating out in the bottle as well, and it's just one of those things. I haven't used Registrars but I don't have this problem with Salix or Scabiosa, so perhaps a less saturated IG would work better for you? I think they are also a bit less dry.