How to Clean a Fountain Pen: A Step-by-Step Guide for UK Tap Water

A fountain pen that skips on the first stroke, writes a pale grey line, or refuses to start at all is usually not damaged. It is dirty. Ink dries in the feed's hair-thin channels, and every flush you skip leaves another layer behind. In the UK, the water you rinse with matters almost as much as the flushing: much of southern and eastern England is hard enough to leave limescale inside a pen. That is why the routine below ends with a step most guides leave out. It takes about ten minutes, once every few fills.

What you will need

• Cool or room-temperature water in a glass or mug
• Distilled or deionised water for the final rinse if you live in a hard water area — a litre from a supermarket or car accessory shop costs very little and lasts for months
• Kitchen roll or an old towel that you do not mind staining
• A bulb syringe, or a plastic syringe with the needle removed, for flushing cartridges and converters
• Optional: a bottle of commercial pen flush from a pen retailer
• Optional: a soft toothbrush for the cap threads and the grip section

Three things that damage a pen faster than dried ink

Water is gentle. Almost everything else you might be tempted to reach for is not.

• Hot water. Tap-hot water can soften and warp resin and celluloid, and it can loosen the shellac holding a vintage section together. Lukewarm at the very most; cool is safer.
• Alcohol, acetone and bleach. These attack plastics, lift printed barrel markings and strip plating in seconds. A drop of mild washing-up liquid in water is acceptable for stubborn ink. Anything sold as a solvent is not.
• Long soaks in the wrong materials. Water is harmless to most modern resin pens, but ebonite (hard rubber) discolours to a dull olive brown, and wood, casein and leather should never be submerged. Keep plated clips and bands above the waterline too, since they pit and flake.

The standard flush, step by step

1. Empty the pen. Write the remaining ink onto scrap paper, or tip it away. Only return ink to the bottle if you are confident the pen is clean — a contaminated bottle ruins every pen you fill from it.
2. Take it apart. Unscrew the section from the barrel and remove the converter or cartridge. If the pen is a piston-filler, leave the mechanism in place; you will work it with the nib submerged.
3. Rinse the section under cool running water. Point the nib downwards so water runs away from the barrel threads, not into them. Then shake out the excess.
4. Flush with the converter. Fill the converter with clean water, then expel it through the nib into the sink. Repeat eight to ten times. You will see the water go from black, to grey, to faintly tinted, to clear.
5. Flush cartridges and converters separately. Push water through them with a syringe, or fill a converter and shake it with your thumb over the opening. Dried ink hides in the narrow end and reappears in a week if you skip this.
6. Change the water often. Flushing in a mug of increasingly inky water does very little. Tip it away and refill whenever it darkens.
7. Soak if the pen has been idle. Stand the section, nib down, in a glass of water for an hour. Overnight is fine for modern pens with no plated trim submerged. If the water turns dark, change it.
8. Give it a final rinse with distilled water — see the next section for why. A quick dip and flush is enough.
9. Shake and dry. Flick the water out, wrap the nib in kitchen roll, and stand the pen nib down so remaining water drains into the paper. Leave it overnight before inking up. Water left in the feed dilutes your first page of writing and can make a fresh fill look washed out.

A note on the barrel and cap

Wipe the inside of the cap with a damp cloth. Ink pools there, and a cap that has been sitting in a drawer for a year will shake dried flakes onto the nib every time you uncap the pen. A soft toothbrush is useful on the threads.

Hard water: the UK problem

Hard water carries dissolved calcium and magnesium. It is why your kettle furs up, and it leaves the same chalky film inside a feed. The channels that carry ink to the nib are narrower than a human hair, so a thin layer of mineral deposit is enough to make flow erratic, cause skipping and eventually block a fine nib completely.

If you live in much of southern and eastern England, or anywhere your kettle scales, adopt two habits. First, never use water from the hot tap — it carries more dissolved minerals, and in older properties it can pick up traces of metal from the pipework. Second, finish every flush with distilled or deionised water, which lifts the tap water's residue out of the feed as it drains. A water filter jug helps, but it reduces hardness rather than removing it, so it is not a substitute in a very hard area. Scotland, Wales, Cornwall and much of the north-west are generally softer, and plain tap water is usually fine there.

Do not be tempted to use boiled water because it feels cleaner. Boiling concentrates the minerals, which is exactly the opposite of what you want inside a pen.

When dried ink will not budge

A pen that has sat with ink in it for a year needs more than water. Soak the section in cool water and change it every few hours — it is slow, but it works. A commercial pen flush speeds things up considerable, particularly with pigment and waterproof inks.

A common homemade alternative is clear household ammonia diluted roughly one part to ten parts water. If you use it, work in a ventilated room, keep it away from vintage pens, ebonite and celluloid, and rinse with plain water afterwards.

Never mix ammonia with bleach, and never leave an ammonia solution in a pen for days. Rinse it out thoroughly.

Ultrasonic cleaners can help with a badly clogged section, but they can also loosen plating and printed markings, so keep the cycle short and check the pen afterwards.

How often should you clean it?

More often than most people do, but not obsessively. A sensible rhythm:

• Every four to six fills, or roughly monthly if you write daily
• Whenever you change ink colour, especially from a saturated red or blue-black to a pale one
• Before any pen goes into storage, without exception
• Immediately, if you notice skipping, hard starts or a nib that dries out overnight

Pens in constant use with the same ink can go longer. A pen left in a drawer does not need cleaning weekly, but it should never be put away wet or inky.

Make it a habit

Choose a quiet moment — a Sunday evening works for many people — empty the pens that need attention, soak the sections, and let them dry overnight before refilling. Keep a litre of distilled water under the sink and it becomes as routine as rinsing a paintbrush. Your nibs will last longer, your ink will look the colour it was meant to look, and you will stop blaming a pen that is only asking for a wash.

Photo: hudsoncrafted / Pixabay