Hello and welcome to Issue#40.

In this issue, I talk about too much emphasis on cleaning pens, look at Swarna pens, and have pictures of Celadon Cat.

A lot of conversations in many of our fountain pen communities are around how to clean your fountain pen. A lot of this revolves around cleaning it to the point of having no signs of usage at all. Which is where my hot take comes in.

Fountain pens are made to be used with fountain pen inks. Using them with the inks will lead to usage marks - which means you might not be able to wash every last molecule of that ink away from your pen. By design, fountain pens aren’t really optimised for that sort of cleaning. Over time, signs of use will manifest themselves on every fountain pen you use regularly, or even semi-regularly.

The obsessive desire to bring every fountain pen to a pristine condition every time you change inks (or sometimes even before refilling the same ink!) ends up with folks doing all sorts of destructive things. Using random cleaning agents without proper knowledge of what other effects it will have and dismantling filling and writing mechanisms everytime to clean them are perhaps the most indulged-in ‘cleaning’ practices.

Using cleaning agents that are not meant for cleaning fountain pens can have a lot of unintended consequences. Different chemical agents act differently on different materials. Your dishwash detergent might be soft on your hands, but there’s no telling what it can do to the insides of your pens - there is the pen material itself (ebonite, acrylic, celluloid or whatever else), the metal parts and the rubber or similar parts. Any of these could react with whatever chemicals you casually toss in to ‘clean’ the pen. A detergent could remove the lubricant, rendering different parts of your pen sticky or hard to use. Using random physical objects can cause damage too. A cloth or an earbud or a dish scrubber - all can have a deleterious effect on different parts of your pen, especially if you are working in a dusty place where small particles can get involved.

Dismantling systems - writing or filling - regularly can also cause unintended damage. These are not made to be disassembled and reassembled on the regular, and doing so can render them loose. Small parts can be lost (o-rings are especially prone to being lost down the drain) when you disassemble a fountain pen. It also gives rise to the possibility that reassembling the pen is done in the wrong way, or in a manner that may damage some of the mechanism. Many a time, by the time we realise that something is wrong, it is too late and a small part has already broken.

Apart from the possibility of damaging your fountain pens by this obsession with cleaning, there is also the constant worry of whether a particular ink will clean out fully from the pen you are going to ink next. This happens to such an extent that there are hobbyists who, despite having a good collection of inks, never use any of them out of a fear that it might be difficult to clean out.

Does this mean we should never clean any of our pens? Of course not.

A couple of years ago, I met a fellow pen enthusiast at the Pelikan Hub. They were carrying a really precious pen - a vintage Japanese eyedropper in chased black ebonite made by a Japanese pen maker who has since passed on. They were kind enough to let me write a few lines in my notebook with the pen, and the experience was as awesome as expected. However, the ink colour was something I could not really place, and so I asked him what ink it was. They casually answered that the latest ink they had put in it was some blue. Intrigued, I asked them what they meant by it and they said they just fill it with whatever ink they have handy whenever it runs out of ink. Cleaning of the pen at this point was not involved at all. This nonchalance flabbergasted me, not in the least because it was a super-precious pen that is well-nigh irreplaceable. But I cannot help but admire the person’s casual use of something a lot of us might put into the ‘too-precious-to-use’ category.

Like with everything else, a balance is called for, that lies somewhere between never cleaning your pen and obsessively and repeatedly cleaning it. When cleaning out a pen that I’m not going to use, I stop when the water runs clean when flushing it. Visible ink stains I try and remove, but am not overly bothered by. When changing inks too, water running clear on flushing is good enough.

I hope you find your own balance in cleaning your pens too!

In the days before ball point pens, ebonite pens were made in plenty in India as there was a huge demand for writing instruments. These were a cottage industry, and unbranded pens abounded. A more detailed look at them is another topic for another day.

In a market flooded with cheaply turned ebonite pens, there were a few penmakers in every geography who made a name for themselves enough to actually put their brands on the pens they made and sold. One of these brands was Swarna pens which were made in Hyderabad by Rangaiah.

I recently acquired two Swarna pens, and was thrilled to note that their sections have a special feature. The end of the section (that screws into the barrel and is in contact with the ink) is not open like many Indian ebonite eye-dropper pens are. Instead, it is completely closed and has a small hole bored in it to let the ink flow to the feed.

A probable reason for the design is to handle burping in hot Hyderabad weather - the less the ink in the reservoir is directly in contact with the feed, the less chance of it burping. However, my high school hydraulics seems to suggest that instead of being spread across a wider area, the weight of the ink in the barrel would be concentrated into a smaller area, and that might actually prove counterproductive. These are, however, merely my thoughts on seeing the design, and writing a few pages with it. As my current fill of Diamine Celadon Cat draws to a close, it remains to be seen how the burping and related aspects are dealt with by the strange (to me) section.

This ink has been on my to-buy list for the longest time. The name itself was a big draw - as I like both celadon and cats. When I saw the colour of the ink, it absolutely fascinated me. And now that I have it, I am simply obsessed with it. It flows quite wetly, contrary to some reviews I have read. I have a full eyedropper fill of it - so if there are any unusual behaviours, I’ll share it in a subsequent issue. Here are a few images for your viewing pleasure.

Here’s a video by Abhinesh of Pen Delight on Sheaffer Imperials. Almost at the end, images of my Sheaffer Imperial Sovereign can be seen. Check it out here:

Share your take on fountain pens and related things in one (or more!) of our upcoming issues.

Any and all content you share will belong to you and will be credited to your name (or a pen name of your choice) and linked to any of your online profiles. Ideal content would be a write-up between 200 and 400 words with 1 to 5 images.

Here are a few things that can go in the Fountain Pen Weekly:

• Pen / ink / paper ownership experience

• Favorites in FP, ink, paper etc.

• Your social handles with your FP content - Insta, FB, Twitter, Reddit

• Any FP-related content you want to call out - articles, podcasts, videos.

If you have any other ideas as well, do share, and I will be happy to think about it.

That’s all from me this week.

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