Suddenly Skipping & Drying Eyedropper

[sombrueil]

This is a custom hard rubber Shawn Newton pen with a vintage Waterman nib in it, configured as an eyedropper. Last year I dropped it and broke the section at the ink window, which Shawn mended for me. It wrote okay after that for awhile but not really. It had the common eyedropper problems of blorping but this wasn't when it was near empty but just say three quarters full. And then it started writing very poorly. As though ink could barely get through to the nib.

 

Upon refilling it would not start without dipping it in ink, or shaking it until drops flew. And it grew steadily worse, writing more dry and skipping all the time until I gave up struggling with it. This is a beautiful (and expensive) pen with a glorious flexible nib in it but something is clearly bigly wrong with it.

 

I am emphatically not a mechanically-minded person but I am hoping for something to try that may preclude me sending it out yet again.

[mhguda]

Not sure if this is belaboring the obvious, but to me it sounds like you may have an inkclot somewhere in there. I have an eyedropper that is giving me similar problems - not one of my regular Indian-made ones, but one of the Additive Pens 3D-printed ones with a fancy, beautiful barrel. You can't see anything wrong happening, it is chugging along just fine, and then - skip. Skip. Hard start. Skip some more. Priming the nib and feed help for a while, so does dipping in either ink or water, but not for long.

But I've learned that if at that point I either soak the section as a whole, or blow water through it with my trusty earbulb, or even take the nib and feed out and scrub, the problem goes away. And, more to the point, I see some semi-solid conglomerations of dye coming out. Once they're gone, I'm fine for a time. But the process repeats after a while...

[sombrueil]

Not sure if this is belaboring the obvious, but to me it sounds like you may have an inkclot somewhere in there. I have an eyedropper that is giving me similar problems - not one of my regular Indian-made ones, but one of the Additive Pens 3D-printed ones with a fancy, beautiful barrel. You can't see anything wrong happening, it is chugging along just fine, and then - skip. Skip. Hard start. Skip some more. Priming the nib and feed help for a while, so does dipping in either ink or water, but not for long.

But I've learned that if at that point I either soak the section as a whole, or blow water through it with my trusty earbulb, or even take the nib and feed out and scrub, the problem goes away. And, more to the point, I see some semi-solid conglomerations of dye coming out. Once they're gone, I'm fine for a time. But the process repeats after a while...

Okay, clearly I can try this first. Thanks!

[mhguda]

Let us know if this works. Not ideal, but at least you'd have a working pen again.

[sombrueil]

Let us know if this works. Not ideal, but at least you'd have a working pen again.

 

Definitely will.

[sombrueil]

So I did disassemble and syringe water through the section and the feed. Did not see any clots. When I filled the pen, the dryness was gone ... but it still is not feeding right. It is way too wet, almost pouring through the feed. Which reminds me that's what it did before -- way way too wet and then won't start, skipping, dry.

 

This is a Waterman 52 nib. It was one amazing nib when it was in the old black hard rubber Waterman that broke. Now it's awful.

[I-am-not-really-here]

I would swap out the feed. When the pen was dropped something might have cracked. A hairline may not be visible to the naked eye but to the thin capillary of ink oozing down an easy redirect. Water follows the path of least resistance.

[sombrueil]

I'll see if I have one, worth a try.

[siamackz]

Sounds like the pen is too wet and so it starts off with too much in on paper and then the feed gets starved of ink so it goes dry and skips. A simple issue would be that the gap between the tines is too large. At least at the tip of the nib do the tines meet? See bottom of page 5 here http://www.richardspens.com/pdf/workshop_notes.pdf

[sombrueil]

Sounds like the pen is too wet and so it starts off with too much in on paper and then the feed gets starved of ink so it goes dry and skips. A simple issue would be that the gap between the tines is too large. At least at the tip of the nib do the tines meet? See bottom of page 5 here http://www.richardspens.com/pdf/workshop_notes.pdf

 

Yes, you are right. The tines meet at the tip but then spread too far, I can see daylight between them. I will try to gently encourage them to close up more.