Fountain Pen Ink, 30 ml

Details

Thirty millilitres of dye-based fountain pen ink in a glass bottle with a sloped base, so the last few millilitres can still be reached with a nib. What an ink is judged on is not colour. It is whether it will still be an ink after four weeks in a pen you forgot about, and whether it will still be a nib after four years of it. So four things are measured and printed, and one claim is refused outright. This ink is not waterproof. A waterproof fountain pen ink is either pigmented or shellac bound, and both of those dry solid in a nib that sits unused for a week. You can have an ink that survives a spilled glass or one that survives being left in a drawer, and for a pen that is picked up and put down all day the second is the right trade. So we make that trade, and print it, instead of writing water resistant and letting you assume.

• Dye-based, fully dissolved, filtered to 0.45 micron. Nothing in the bottle can settle in a feed channel or block a slit
• Measured pH 7.2 to 8.0 at 27 C. Ink outside roughly 6.5 to 9 attacks either the feed or the nib, and the number is printed rather than described as balanced
• No iron gall. Iron gall ink is genuinely permanent and it is also mildly acidic and slowly corrodes a steel nib and the feed. We do not sell one and we are not going to pretend that is a limitation of nothing
• No pigment and no shellac, which is the same decision as the waterproofing one, stated as a composition rather than as a benefit
• It carries a preservative, benzisothiazolinone at under 0.05 percent, because a bottle of water and dye at 35 C grows mould in an Indian summer otherwise. We would rather name it than sell an ink that fails in July
• Water resistance, honestly: a wet finger will smear a fresh line and a soaked page will run. Sepia runs the most, ink black the least, and none of the four is safe on a document that may get wet
• Lightfastness differs by colour. Blue black and ink black hold well. Midnight blue shifts slightly over a year in a sunlit window. Sepia is the least lightfast of the four and that is the nature of the colour
• Nib corrosion tested by four weeks of immersion on AISI 304 coupons, the alloy of our own nib, with no measurable pitting
• Behaviour is a property of ink and paper together, not ink alone. On the 120 GSM dot grid journal in this range there is no feathering at any nib width. On 70 GSM copier paper a medium nib will feather, and that is the paper
• A converter holds about 0.7 ml, so 30 ml is roughly 42 fills. An international standard cartridge holds about 0.8 ml
• Glass bottle with a polypropylene cap and a liner. It stains skin, cloth and stone. It is not food and it goes nowhere near a child