Tong Family

The one thing about the fountain pen world is that when you get one, they sort of expect you to know everything about it and half my pens don’t have instructions at all (Pilot is different that way). And I admit it, I’ve not cleaned these pens in three years, so my bad, so here’s a noobs guide to cleaning

Recycle the ink, don’t just dump it!

The first thing is that you shouldn’t just dump all that expensive ink into the sink. What you do is figure out how to squirt the ink out and then put it back into the bottle into which it came. I’ve had the same ink bottle for three years, but now that I’m writing more I’m half empty and I’m pretty sure most of it went into the water when I cleaned them, so you are warned

Figure out what kind of pen you have

As luck would have it of my four pens, all four have entirely different ways of cleaning and inking them. Well at least, I have covered most of the major ways. And when you look on YouTube, they have generic how-to clean and fill and ink, but you need to know what you should be doing for your specific.

Make sure you have something like a foil pan around it

Ink is incredible, well permanent, and I hope no one notices the blue stains near the sink 🙂 But the thing I found useful for noobs is to get a big aluminum serving thingy like you get from takeout place, put all your stuff in there including your inks and cleaning water. I stick a bunch of absorbent towels in there as well.

Here is a pen decoder

I’m sure there are better guides, but here are the four different pens that I have which is a YouTube playlist listed here. While the written guides are good which you will see below this is a case where a picture is worth a thousand words:

So here are some details on the four pens:

1. Lamy 2000. This doesn’t have anything removable. What you have is you unscrew the back of the pen and this unleashes a pump thingy (yes there’s a cool name for this). So first of all, find the ink bottle and pull the pump thing in and out and squirt as much of the ink as possible. This stuff is totally good and you save a lot of money. Now you have done this, you can unscrew the nib. Be careful, there is a tiny little metal ring that will drop out, it is used to let the cap snap-in. It’s super easy to lose, so either have a grate on your drain or use the metal container so you can’t use it. Then you. The guide says that you can pull out the nib as well, but I wasn’t brave enough to do this so I just rinsed the nib part well. When you are done, make sure you put the metal ring between the nib and the back of the pen. And then to fill it, stick the nib into the ink and pull the plunger and then push it down and screw it in.
2. Pilot P-Plunger. This is what is a called a vacuum filler. What this has is that you take the back off and the plunger for just pulls out. To empty it, stick the nib over the ink bottle and push and pull, this will push all the ink out. It is messy so be carefully. When you are done, you unscrew the front of the nib and you can run water through it. Wait for it to dry and then here’s the trick, put the nib into the ink and then push down, there is going to be a distinctive click and you will see the ink fill in the back of the well. If you want it completely full, you carefully turn it upside down and push the plunger until the ink that is in the back has no air, then turn it around and plung and pull and it completely fill. I normally don’t use all that much ink, so half full is fine for me. You can tell if you have P-plunger by looking at the little instruction manual and it should P-Plunger :-0
3. Nahvalur Original Plus with vacuum filler. This is like the Pilot P-plunger in that to empty it, find the ink bottle and then unscrew the back where the plunger is and pull and push. This should empty it. Now you can just clean it by unscrewing the nib and then you can clean the ink holder pretty easier.
4. Pilot Con-40 Cartridge Converter. My final pen uses cartridges and comes with a converter. You open this up and when you open the back, you find your ink bottle and then push the plunger and it should empty it. Now that this is done, you just put the convertor into the water and push and pull to clean it. For the nib, you also run water through it and then let if all try. To fill it is the easiest thing, you just put it all together and put it into the ink and push a few times and it fills.