Do you ever put ink back in the bottle?

[Wizergig]

Is this a safe practice? Sometimes I will have a pen that I am not going to use for awhile, and I like to clean them up. Sometimes that is a fair amount of ink down the sink. Would you ever put ink back into a bottle once it has been in a pen for awhile?

[jd50ae]

Yes.

[andyk]

I have recently started making a note of which ink I put in which pen (sorry but I can't always tell just by looking at it) and if I get bored with a pen before it runs out and it still has quite a lot of ink left I do return it to it's bottle.

 

If it's only a bit or I can't remember which colour then I throw it away, I always flush teh pen if I am going to put it away or use a different colour.

[LapsangS]

Yep. I normally put the ink back to the bottle, especially if I need to empty an eyedropper or piston filler pen with lots of ink left in the tank. Flushing it down the drain would be insane waste of ink and money. But if the ink has been in the pen for too long (not fresh anymore) I tend to discard it.

[Elaine]

Never, never ever.

[Tricia]

I don't, but then I rarely empty a pen that still has ink in it.

[Ghost Plane]

I write my pens dry.

[Shangas]

To my knowledge, pumping ink from the pen back into the bottle it came from, if you're not going to be using the pen for a while, is perfectly safe. I've done it dozens of times, without any consequences.

[Paddler]

I never put ink back in the bottle. I try to write the pen dry. If I think the ink level is getting low in a pen I want to take out and about, I empty the reservoir down the drain and then refill it. This is a holdover from my education in chemistry: you never return any decanted reagent to its bottle. If some is wasted, you wasted it when you decanted it, not when you poured it down the drain.

 

Paddler

 

[Titivillus]

Is this a safe practice? Sometimes I will have a pen that I am not going to use for awhile, and I like to clean them up. Sometimes that is a fair amount of ink down the sink. Would you ever put ink back into a bottle once it has been in a pen for awhile?

 

 

No. I don't know if the nib and whatever pen I put the ink in doesn't have some nice micro organisms in it that I would be dosing back into the ink bottle that could then be transmitted to every other pen that I fill from it.

 

 

Don't know but as I usually write a pen dry there is not a great amount of times that I have had to think about this.

 

 

K

[cowdad]

Is this a safe practice? Sometimes I will have a pen that I am not going to use for awhile, and I like to clean them up. Sometimes that is a fair amount of ink down the sink. Would you ever put ink back into a bottle once it has been in a pen for awhile?

 

There are a couple reasons for not doing it. First, I could get it mixed up and put it back in the wrong bottle. Second, I prefer to take ink out of the bottle with a syringe and never dip a nib in the bottle--because who knows what's on the nib. Third, I'm pretty sure I've got a lifetime supply of ink, so if a little ink gets tossed out, that's just some ink for years I won't even be here.

[Viseguy]

As a rule, I don't. But there was a time when I was less fastidious in this regard and put ink back in the bottle all the time, and I never suffered any ill effect. So, as I see it, it's largely a matter of personal preference. If you opt to do it, what's the worst that can happen? A bottle of ink goes south. Not the end of the world -- but, as I say, it never happened to me in years of putting ink back.

[Garageboy]

Ink is cheap, dump and flush for me

[RayMan]

Yes, I did so today. Based on some of the comments above, however, I might stop.

[FrankB]

I do not put ink back into a bottle as a rule. I try to write my pens dry. If I have a piston filler or an eye dropper that holds a lot of ink, I try to judge how much ink I might use before I fill it. From time to time, however, if the ink is still relatively fresh, I have been know to return it to the bottle.

[hilsedwards]

To keep the microbes and fungi at bay in my stock ink bottles, I slurp any leftover ink into a separate 10ml glass bottle. when it is full I use a pipette and a piece of blotting paper to assess if there is any precipitate and a dip pen to assess the colour. I have had some smashing results. (on the other hand I have had some very vomit making results)

The down side, of course, is that you will not be able to duplicate the colour again!

[extrafine]

I prefer to drop it directly into another pen, to avoid any potential accidents. I syringe it out if possible, otherwise dump it out into a glass and suck it up with a syringe, and then put it into what I'll call a "syringe-filler" pen, and use it from there.

[Ernst Bitterman]

I do it, but with awareness that I might be setting myself up for some kind of more-wasteful fungi frenzy. I'm betting I'll empty the bottle before they have a chance to breed (I'm using about 1/2 a penful a day at work anyway), and I always flush the pens throroughly before storing.

Edited July 16, 2007 by Ernst Bitterman

[slimnib]

Ink is cheap, do not take chances, dump it.

 

Harv

[aunt rebecca]

hi,

 

i have seen this topic and avoided reading it--i finally realized why--i just spent the weekend with my 7 1/2 year old granddaughter who i call thunder princess because when she enters a room--the room goes boom-boom--[wow that's a mouthful. anyway the practice is yucky!!