Cold Car, Frozen Ink?

[jdwhitak]

Lately, I've gotten in the habit or storing my briefcase in my car in order to do some studying at my local library after work. I live in central Indiana and the weather is getting colder. My question to the community is if this is a potential problem for my fountain pens. Can the ink in them freeze? Thanks!

[Chrissy]

I doubt that the ink would freeze, but problems could potentially occur with your pens. I wouldn't leave any valuable pens in a car anyway, but especially not in below freezing temperatures.

 

If you have contents insurance under your house policy, it generally doesn't automatically apply to items left in your car, so if someone breaks into your car and takes your briefcase, you probably won't be insured.

[Fuzzy_Bear]

Yes. Ink can freeze; hence, Noodler's Polar series of inks.

[Parker51]

Also, there is a known problem which occurs with metal capped pens, they contract when they get cold. This is one of the reasons you will find some pens which have been deformed. I personally made this mistake when I was starting out with a Parker 45.

[PS104]

Excessive cold is not good for any thing. Bring your pens (and inks) inside with you. I read in these forums where people don't order ink through the mail in the cold months as the ink can freeze and break the bottle. Noodlers inks are famous for being topped off not leaving much room for expansion. Most mail is not kept warm and cozy but live a rather hard life in unheated storage units, unheated mail trucks/trains, unheated Post Offices. After that they wind up in your unheated mailbox waiting for you to come home to rescue them. Even after you bring everything inside you have to let them achieve room temperature on their own accord. I've also read here about people who anxious to try out a new pen take it apart only to wind up with a pile of plastic shards at their feet. You would not want to come back to this world in a second life as a piece of mail.

Good point re metal caps on plastic pens

Edited November 16, 2016 by PS104

[lapis]

That was a good post. I think the color was a good choice.

[Biber]

Being in Indiana (I'm in Ohio) I think you have some time before you have to be concerned with the inside of your car getting down below freezing over night, though not much time, maybe weeks, not months. We've only just started to get frosts, here on the north coast. I am of the opinion that a car does indeed offer some degree of insulation and it is doubtful that the interior will get substantially below freezing with the mild frosts we've thus far had. Certainly your briefcase offers some degree of insulation as well. But still, its best to play it safe and not leave your briefcase in the car over night. I too seem to have taken to leaving my briefcase with pens in it in the car over night, though with an eye toward colder weather I've started bringing it inside.

[Flaxmoore]

I only leave one pen in my car at all times, a Fisher Bullet BP. It can handle the cold, I don't trust my ink the same way. When we move this winter/spring, the inks are going in the car in their own box, like our fine glass- minimize breaking and cold shock.

[ParkerDuofold]

Lately, I've gotten in the habit or storing my briefcase in my car in order to do some studying at my local library after work. I live in central Indiana and the weather is getting colder. My question to the community is if this is a potential problem for my fountain pens. Can the ink in them freeze? Thanks!

Hello JD,

 

This is a habit you want to break ASAP. Don't leave ANYTHING of ANY value in your car. Not only do cars get really cold in the winter, (there are many reported cases of people who got frostbite when they got stuck in their snowbound car); they become blast furnaces in the summer- which also isn't good for ink or pens and this doesn't even begin to mention the risk of attracting thieves.

 

It's just not a good practice to leave anything you care about in an unattended car.

 

- Anthony

[Fuzzy_Bear]

As to a car providing insulation, only to a degree. In the cold, you will only stay a few degrees above the outside temp. Stuff will freeze. Just ask the water and coke I used to keep in my car when I was young. I live in Texas, so we don't usually go before freezing until January. But we did have one cold snap when I was 18 or so ever the battery in my car would freeze. I had a spare. I swapped the frozen one for the one in the garage and took the frozen one to work. When I got to work, I took it in to unfreeze. Swapped them again when I left work.

 

As for summer; no, don't do it. My '79 Mercury Capri, known as Timex, had a red interior with brown, sugary patches from when the coke can exploded while I was driving. Took two hours just to clean the windshield.

[inkstainedruth]

As to a car providing insulation, only to a degree. In the cold, you will only stay a few degrees above the outside temp. Stuff will freeze. Just ask the water and coke I used to keep in my car when I was young.

 

Agreed. There is nothing *quite* like trying to pry frozen Mountain Dew off your floor mats....

There are a whole lot of inks I want to try at the moment. Some of which are exclusive (or mostly exclusive) to certain online sellers.... But Pittsburgh has already seen snow flurries. And yesterday had wind chills in the teens. So, I'm thinking that I should hold off on orders for the time being, and maybe only shop in B&M stores for the time being, where I can then bring the bottles inside in a short amount of time. They're probably safe for an hour or two, but I wouldn't leave them in a car for longer than that.

I was keeping a weather eye (more or less literally) out for a package that I was expecting -- replacement toner cartridges for the color laser printer (the black is completely out, and the other colors are apparently at 30% or less). So not only did I have to worry about package thieves, but (effectively) electronics parts....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[praxim]

Insulation is only a medium to slow down heat transfer. It warms or cools nothing. Sooner or later, what is on one side of the material will match the temperature on the other side. In the case of a car, glass windows, metal body and a dash of roof lining, that will be sooner rather than later.

 

This is for Winter. In Summer, a different set of factors apply, to wit the reflectiveness of glass to infrared. In Winter the same effect will help to sustain a car's internal temperature during the day, which might be misconstrued as an insulation effect. At night you had better park under a strong streetlight

 

I agree entirely with ParkerDuofold. It is just a bad habit to leave anything heat/cold sensitive in a car because you are then more likely to do it in the wrong season. Where I am, solar forcing is all that matters but we have plenty of it except in Winter.

[mulrich]

We're moving cross country and I packed all my pens and inks into a five gallon bucket which I can easily move in and out of a car. I didn't want to risk ink in a semi truck trailer over night in the mountain west.

Edited December 10, 2016 by Mulrich

[inkstainedruth]

We're moving cross country and I packed all my pens and inks into a five gallon bucket which I can easily move in and out of a car. I didn't want to risk ink in a semi truck trailer over night in the mountain west.

 

Not to mention if your belongings had to go into storage for any length of time. I met a woman up in Massachusetts who had the moving company store her stuff in a place that flooded. They denied it (in fact they denied *storing* her stuff) but she said she could see the water damage on the legs of her tables and chairs. Unfortunately, while the movers advertised that they were affiliated with one of the major national chains, this was in fact no longer the case, and she got nowhere with the "parent" company. I think she had to threaten the movers with legal action in order to get any money out of them (actually, she said she went into their office and casually said "Wouldn't you have trouble walking if you didn't have any kneecaps?" to the owner, and he threatened to have her arrested for making terroristic threats.... ).

We've never used professional movers. The first couple of houses we owned, we couldn't afford to. When we moved back to the Pittsburgh area we seriously considered it. But since we didn't yet have a permanent place to move *into*, we started out by staying with friends for a couple of months, and then renting a furnished house for a few months from some other friends who were out of the country for work (and didn't like the idea of their house sitting empty) -- first to have a temporary base of operations while house hunting, and then, after the closing, for another couple of months while work such as rewiring and replacing the roof were done before we could actually move in. A professional moving company would have required us (ostensively for insurance purposes) to store *our* stuff with THEM -- for a lot more money than one of the local storage rental places; we already had stuff in a 10' x10' unit in a warehouse building and then also got a 10x20 at a drive-up place a couple of miles from the house we ended up buying. Once we had moved in, I would go over to one or the other unit a couple of times a week to retrieve as much stuff as I could (a) easily get to without the rest of the contents turning into a giant game of "Jenga" (especially the 10' x 20' unit, where friends had helped unload the truck, the contents of which were stacked pretty much to the ceiling -- and to some extent precariously as well); ( safely lift; © fit in the back of whichever vehicle I had at that time without being massively overweight....

The 10' x 10' unit was, IIRC, about $90 US a month. The bigger unit at the drive-up place was around $124. And combined was still cheaper than storage fees at the moving company's location....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[Runnin_Ute]

I try to keep stuff in the car to a minimum during the cold winter months. Thursday night we went to a production of White Christmas downtown. I didn't have time to swing buy the house before I had to pickup my wife before dinner and the show. So my bag, including a wrap 6-8 pens went in the trunk until we got home several hours later. (picked her up between 5:00-5:30 and we got home about 11:00. Although we were parked in an underground garage which certainly is better than had we been in an open air lot or garage. I could have moved it to the passenger compartment, but didn't. I didn't try using them until the next day so no harm no foul.

[mulrich]

 

Not to mention if your belongings had to go into storage for any length of time. I met a woman up in Massachusetts who had the moving company store her stuff in a place that flooded. They denied it (in fact they denied *storing* her stuff) but she said she could see the water damage on the legs of her tables and chairs. Unfortunately, while the movers advertised that they were affiliated with one of the major national chains, this was in fact no longer the case, and she got nowhere with the "parent" company. I think she had to threaten the movers with legal action in order to get any money out of them (actually, she said she went into their office and casually said "Wouldn't you have trouble walking if you didn't have any kneecaps?" to the owner, and he threatened to have her arrested for making terroristic threats.... ).

We've never used professional movers. The first couple of houses we owned, we couldn't afford to. When we moved back to the Pittsburgh area we seriously considered it. But since we didn't yet have a permanent place to move *into*, we started out by staying with friends for a couple of months, and then renting a furnished house for a few months from some other friends who were out of the country for work (and didn't like the idea of their house sitting empty) -- first to have a temporary base of operations while house hunting, and then, after the closing, for another couple of months while work such as rewiring and replacing the roof were done before we could actually move in. A professional moving company would have required us (ostensively for insurance purposes) to store *our* stuff with THEM -- for a lot more money than one of the local storage rental places; we already had stuff in a 10' x10' unit in a warehouse building and then also got a 10x20 at a drive-up place a couple of miles from the house we ended up buying. Once we had moved in, I would go over to one or the other unit a couple of times a week to retrieve as much stuff as I could (a) easily get to without the rest of the contents turning into a giant game of "Jenga" (especially the 10' x 20' unit, where friends had helped unload the truck, the contents of which were stacked pretty much to the ceiling -- and to some extent precariously as well); ( safely lift; © fit in the back of whichever vehicle I had at that time without being massively overweight....

The 10' x 10' unit was, IIRC, about $90 US a month. The bigger unit at the drive-up place was around $124. And combined was still cheaper than storage fees at the moving company's location....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

Two fortunate things for us. First, my new job is paying for the move. Second, the truck driver that worked to load our stuff is the same person who'll unload our stuff and he only has one stop in between. The truck will actually make it to our new house faster than we will. I know professional movers don't always work out this way but I'm not going to complain. Moving across the country is hard.

[ParkerDuofold]

....Moving across the country is hard.

Hi Mulrich,

 

Moving across the street is hard; moving across country is brutal.

 

My dad was a civil engineer and often times his job was wherever the next big project was. I spent my childhood and my youth moving every two or three years... if you really want a hair curling experience, try an overseas move... their a real delight.

 

The way you describe it, your move doesn't too bad, though, and I'm glad for you for that. Take heart, this too shall pass.

 

- Anthony