How to Clean a Fountain Pen with a Converter

If you have a fountain pen that takes a cartridge or converter, and you have the converter for it, this is the post for you on how to keep it clean. This includes pens like the Lamy Safari with the Lamy converter or the Jinhao 126 that is used in the demonstration. What you will need: Your fountain pen A converter that fits your fountain pen Two bowls of water (or a bowl of water and the sink) A cloth that can get a little inky

Step 1: Swish around the nib in the water. You will likely get quite a bit of ink right away, as the water will draw some of the ink from the feed and around the nib. Generally, it is recommended that you use distilled water so you don't get any of the minerals or fluoride building up in your pen, but I feel pretty comfortable with tap water at room temperature.

Step 2: Draw up the inky water into the converter to begin flushing the nib. The water will be quite dark, but much diluted from the "pure" ink that was just in the pen. I like to move my nib around to the cleanest part of the water in the bowl as sometimes the inkiest water just kind of sits where it was just pushed out. Draw up and flush out several times until the water has been totally muddied up.

Step 3: At this point, you can wipe off the nib to draw out any concentrated ink still left. The feed and nib use capillary action to draw out the ink when writing, so you should be able to draw a little water and ink onto your cloth. This step is optional, but you should have a cloth handy anyways, so you might as well.

Step 4: Draw up water from the second bowl of clean water, and dispense that water into the dirty bowl. Do this several times until the water runs clear, and then maybe do it a few more times after that.

Step 5: Wipe off. If you see any residual ink on your cloth, you will want to flush out a few more times.

Step 6: Leave your pen nib down on a cloth or paper towel to draw out any moisture. You can do this overnight, and it's particularly important if you're cleaning your pen because you're not using it and you want to store it - you don't want moisture trapped in.