How to store vintages

[The_Beginner]

I just snagged me a NOS bottle of carters blue black how do i store this 32 OZ beast? 

Then how do i check if it magicailly spoiled or not?

 

Edit: This is an Iron gall ink.

[InesF]

21 hours ago, The_Beginner said:

Edit: This is an Iron gall ink.

Congrats to your acquisition! 👍

 

If it is iron-gall, it should have a pH-value around 1 (or below) which limits the growth of microbes. However, if water condenses inside above the ink (when you store the bottle in a place with some temperature fluctuation) the top layer can become susceptible for some molds. If you can avoid condensation and if you can avoid excess oxygen contact of the content, your ink is safe for the coming 100 years.

[Mercian]

Firstly, you need to store it in the dark (i.e. inside a cupboard).
Light will speed-up the process of the iron-gall ink reacting with the oxygen in the air that is inside the bottle, and make the ink ‘go bad’ - i.e. make the iron salts react with oxygen and the ink throw a precipitate.
That chemical reaction is the one that makes the ink turn black (and become water resistant) on paper.
You don’t want it to happen in the bottle, because if it does, the ink won’t then be able to do it when you write with it on paper.

 

If you try to use ink that has oxidised in the bottle, you will find that its colour has (already) changed.
And you don’t want to draw up any of the precipitate into any of your fountain pens! It might clog the tiny channels in the pens’ feeds. So, you should never shake a bottle of iron-gall ink.

 

In order to make your iron-gall ink last for as long as possible, you should decant it in to a set of smaller bottles.
These should, preferably be made of dark brown glass, and have airtight caps - the ‘sirop’ (sic) bottles used for medicines are ideal. They are also inexpensive.
Noodler’s 3oz ink bottles are also ideal. As are the 50ml bottles used by Rohrer & Klingner.
But any glass bottles with airtight caps are good, as long as you store them out of the light.
Plastic bottles can be glass-permeable, and the hydrochloric acid in the ink will ‘out-gas’ from them, and atmospheric oxygen will get in to those bottles, and react with the ink.
e.g. the safe-for-posting soft plastic 110ml bottles in which Diamine Registrars’ Ink and ESSRI get shipped to consumers are gas-permeable and, if one does not decant one’s ink out of them, it will ‘go off’ (oxidise) and throw a precipitate fairly quickly.

You will want to sterilise your smaller bottles before decanting your ink into them, and also make sure that each one of them is full of ink - i.e. that there is no air (or as little air as possible) sitting on top of the ink in any bottle (again, to minimise the mount of oxygen that is in contact with the ink).

 

I transferred my 110ml of ESSRI into one 50ml sirop bottle, and two other 30ml sirop bottles.
I used ‘Milton’ fluid (sold in the UK for treating the bottles etc from which one feeds babies) to sterilise the sirop bottles before decanting the ink into them.
I am using the bottles in the following order: 30ml, then 30ml, then transfer 30ml from the 50ml bottle into one of the 30ml bottles, and the other 20ml into the other 30ml bottle, using-up the 20ml first.

This is because I am a tightwad a miser blessed with the prudent attitude/dislike of waste that comes from having been raised by a mother from Yorkshire, and so I want to get as much use out of my ink as I can 😉

[The_Beginner]

Cheers guys thank you for the tips!

[Christopher Godfrey]

If you are storing ink in a glass bottle and want to keep the ink level <up> to obviate oxidisation, remember the old trick of dropping children's glass marbles into the bottle (I used to do this in my bottles of fixer in the old darkroom days of B&W photography).

 

I hope Mercian would approve?  😊

[Mercian]

41 minutes ago, Christopher Godfrey said:

I hope Mercian would approve?  😊

Indeed yes!

’tis a Plan that is so Cunning that you could brush your teeth with it 😉