Making ink wetter with soap

[AimlessWanderer]

I have done this a couple of times so far, with very good results. I had previously done a bottle of Diamine Teal, which was painfully dry, and feeds had trouble keeping up, even at normal writing speeds. My new bottle of Diamine Salamander was almost as bad.

I thought it was going to be a problem, as while the other inks that arrived with it, all performed well with a dip pen, the Salamander didn't. The dip pen laid a ridiculously fat line, and the flutes were dry within just a few words.

I did a single cartridge test first, and filled a cartridge for a pen I know is usually a wet writer, and it was very patchy. Not quite skipping, but noticeably thinning and fading. I took the syringe I fill the carts with, and smeared a very tiny amount on the tip of the needle, removed the cartridge, and stirred it in. I use the blue all purpose liquid travel soap. Vast improvement. I'll be treating the rest of the bottle the same way.

I have two other bottles of Diamine (Passion Red and Violet), which are nowhere near as dry as the Teal and Salamander, but not quite as wet as I like either. I'll probably give those a little tweak too. If an ink "shades", I prefer it to be mostly dark with the occasional light bit, rather than the other way around.

 

[Borderboss]

I use several types of Diamine ink in a lot of different pens and have no trouble whatsoever. This sounds more like a problem with the pen. Have you thoroughly rinsed out the feed?

 

[AimlessWanderer]

I use several types of Diamine ink in a lot of different pens and have no trouble whatsoever. This sounds more like a problem with the pen. Have you thoroughly rinsed out the feed?

Yeah, the pen was clean. I knew it was an ink issue from how it flowed from the dip pen, and it's behavioural similarity in a fountain pen, to the Teal I fixed before. Once the (now) wetter ink worked its way through the feed to the nib, it worked like a charm. I've just scrawled a few test lines before replying here, and it's now performing perfectly.

If I remember, I'll do a before and after picture with the dip pen, when I "correct" the rest of the bottle.

 

[Ebberman]

I have done this a couple of times so far, with very good results. I had previously done a bottle of Diamine Teal, which was painfully dry, and feeds had trouble keeping up, even at normal writing speeds. My new bottle of Diamine Salamander was almost as bad.

I thought it was going to be a problem, as while the other inks that arrived with it, all performed well with a dip pen, the Salamander didn't. The dip pen laid a ridiculously fat line, and the flutes were dry within just a few words.

I did a single cartridge test first, and filled a cartridge for a pen I know is usually a wet writer, and it was very patchy. Not quite skipping, but noticeably thinning and fading. I took the syringe I fill the carts with, and smeared a very tiny amount on the tip of the needle, removed the cartridge, and stirred it in. I use the blue all purpose liquid travel soap. Vast improvement. I'll be treating the rest of the bottle the same way.

I have two other bottles of Diamine (Passion Red and Violet), which are nowhere near as dry as the Teal and Salamander, but not quite as wet as I like either. I'll probably give those a little tweak too. If an ink "shades", I prefer it to be mostly dark with the occasional light bit, rather than the other way around.

Hello - could you tell me more about "the blue all-purpose liquid travel soap." I don't understand, perhaps because I don't travel.

 

[AimlessWanderer]

Hello - could you tell me more about "the blue all-purpose liquid travel soap." I don't understand, perhaps because I don't travel.

Sure. Lifeventure All-Purpose Soap. The sort of soap that some folks use when camping/backpacking. I don't go camping anymore, but still have half a bottle left from when I did do outdoorsy stuff.

 

[AimlessWanderer]

A few piccies...

The dip pen I am doing this with, is one of the cheapo glass pens with the helical nibbed flute.



You'll notice the first two inks on the page needed tweaking. The surface tension was dragging far too much ink off the nib. That "gloopiness" was what was holding back the flow through the pen feeds. The soap lessened that surface tension, and over a few tweaks, refined the ink flow so it will behave much better.



Apologies for not having fountain pen comparisons, I didn't fancy cleaning and drying them out multiple times for this exercise. However, I'm perfectly sure they'll behave now. The Chocolate Brown did look like I had overcooked it slightly, but after a little more time to equalise, it seems to have settled down nicely.

All the others on this page perform just fine. The Teal and Twilight are still a little dry in some pens, and you can see they are maybe a very slightly wider line, but they both perform well enough.

Oh, and I was wrong about the Violet and Passion Red. They're not dry, they're just not as highly saturated as my other inks. They don't look too bad on this example, but can be quite weak on the page from a fountain pen... depending on whixh pen.

I hope this is useful if anyone has some ink that's not behaving how they want. Just go steady, and tweak a little as a time. You can always add a little more later if you need to, but good luck trying to take excess soap back out again...

 

[AimlessWanderer]

As for quantity of soap, I was adding a blob less than 1mm (under 1/32") at a time, on a whole 30ml bottle. REALLY small amounts.

 

[jar_]

Use detergent and not soap.

 

[AimlessWanderer]

I used what I have to hand I don't know enough about chemistry to know if the stuff I wash my clothes with, would be any better or worse, but what I have used seems to have worked just fine.