My Allaying Cross Century

[James_Marquette]

Hello,

 

I have a Cross Century, (at least I think its a Cross Century) in which I have placed a converter and a cartridge in, flushed with water and ammonia mix, and stood and my head for...yet I cannot get it to wite consistantly. The pen has cold starts and then will often stop writing all togather a few words in.

 

Now, as far as I can tell there is no issues with the nib. (athough I have never removed it, as I am not sure how) So I was wondering if there was any sort of common error with these pens.

 

Thanks,

James Marquette

[ac12]

Not knowing the history of the pen...

 

Have you soaked the section, nib down, overnight?

If the pen has dry ink in the section and ink channel, soaking will dissolve (or start to dissolve) it. If you have an ink cloud in the cup in the morning, flush the pen, change the water and soak it again, and repeat the soaking process until no more ink comes out of the pen. (I would use an UltraSonic Cleaner to clean out old dry ink.)

 

Do NOT try to remove the nib/feed. It is not easily removable (or removable at all), and you will likely break it. Spare nib/feed parts are no longer available from Cross for the original Century. IOW break it and the pen is DEAD.

 

What ink are you using?

I use Cross black bottle ink in my Century.

But if you are having flow problems, and the soaking does not improve it, I would try Waterman ink.

 

The other possibility is that the nib has been put out of adjustment, such as too much gap between the nib and feed. Unfortunately, I do not know how to fix the Cross nib, as you can't remove nib assembly. You "might" be able to pull the nib off the feed, but doing so might also damage the feed.

[max dog]

I have one just like yours. I purchased mine on ebay and when I got it the cartridge installed had ink that completely dried to powder. The nib was clogged badly. I had to soak it in ammonia solution for several days before I could get it to start writing. Those century nibs are exceptionally smooth and worth the patience and effort to fix.

[miket_nyc]

I just bought one of these in black (identical to the one in the photo), after I dipping the point in ink before buying it and confirming that it wrote extremely well. I thought this was all I needed to do to prove the pen was OK, but then I had the same problem as James after I flushed it with warm water and put a new cartridge in it. The feed kept running out of ink.

 

So I flushed it in JB's Perfect Pen Flush, then soaked it overnight, and now it's fine. (To flush it, I put a drinking straw in the back and repeatedly sucked the Pen Flush up through the feed and blew it back down). I don't think merely soaking the section of a cartridge pen in something will necessarily do the job, because you're not actually getting fresh solution to the place where the clog is.

 

This is a pretty pen, very modern looking and slim enough for my (rather small) hands. It writes great now (and it's also the only cartridge pen I own that you can still buy cartridges for).

[Mike 59]

Hi James, As you have a converter already, you can use it to push water through the feed, which is the most likely answer to this problem.

If you have a glass of water with one or two drops of dish washing up liquid mixed in, then you can hold the nib under the water while operating the converter.

Flushing the water up and down through the feed will really help, and it might take several attempts with overnight 'soaking' in between.