Cleared out my late uncle's desk and came away with roughly thirty bottles, some sealed, most half used, a lot of it Parker Quink and a few with no labels at all. They spent at least a decade in a garage that gets very cold in winter and stuffy in summer. I do not want to put anything horrible in the two decent pens I own. What is the actual test for whether an old bottle is fine?
I am going to be the unpopular one and say do not filter and use the questionable ones. You have two decent pens and thirty bottles of free ink, which means your supply of ink is not the scarce thing here. A coffee filter takes out the visible strands and does nothing about whatever is growing at a scale you cannot see, and the failure mode is a feed you have to soak for a week. Keep the clean ones, bin the doubtful ones, do not be sentimental about a half bottle of Quink.
Clear and sealed, use it. Cloudy or stringy, bin it. Anything with a smell, bin it and wash the bottle out if you want to keep the glass.
I did this with eleven bottles from a house clearance. Nine were fine and are still in rotation, one had visible growth around the neck, one was clear but wrote grey where it should have been blue black, which I put down to the dye breaking down over time.
The useful trick was the canary pen. I bought the cheapest usable fountain pen I could find and every unknown ink went into that pen first for a week. If it wrote well and cleaned out normally, the ink graduated to a real pen. That cost about the price of two coffees and saved me a lot of anxiety.
Worth adding that the canary should be a pen you can fully disassemble with your hands, so if something does go wrong you can see what happened rather than guess.
Canary pen ordered. Obvious in hindsight and I would absolutely have gone straight for the good pen.
Swatch the unlabelled ones before you decide anything about them. Discontinued colours from that era turn up in exactly this sort of box and some of them are lovely and unrepeatable, which changes how carefully you want to treat the sorting. A cheap dip pen and a card per bottle takes an hour.
My contribution is what not to do. Put a bottle with a bit of fluff in it through a filter, decided it was fine, and inked a piston filler with it. Three weeks later flow got worse and worse and there was a grey film inside the barrel. It took a long soak, several flushes with pen flush and a lot of swearing. The ink was free. The evening was not.
@sql_window_fn · 6d ago · 2 replies
Ink does not really expire the way food does, it fails in specific visible ways, and you can sort thirty bottles in an afternoon.
Hold each one up to a bright light. What you are looking for is cloudiness, stringy strands hanging in the liquid, a skin or film on the surface, or fuzzy growth around the neck and under the cap. Then open it and smell it. Healthy old ink smells of almost nothing or faintly of the preservative. Bad ink smells sour or musty and you will know immediately.
Sealed and clear after thirty years is very likely fine. Half used, cloudy, with a smell is mould, and it goes in the bin. The in-between ones with a bit of sediment but no smell can often be decanted off the top and used, though see the disagreement below.
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@swatch_sonia · 5d ago
Adding a step: shake gently and watch what the sediment does. Fine sediment that disperses into an even cloud and settles again is usually pigment or dried dye and is harmless. Sediment that stays in lumps or hangs in threads is biological and no amount of filtering makes it a good idea.
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