A fountain pen is one of the few everyday objects that rewards a little attention. Look after it and it will write beautifully for decades. Leave it in a drawer for a year with ink still inside, and it will skip, hard-start and feel scratchy for reasons that seem mysterious but usually aren't. Cleaning a pen takes about ten minutes, needs no special tools, and is hard to get wrong if you follow a few sensible rules. Here is the whole routine, from flushing to drying.

How often does a fountain pen need cleaning?

More often than most people think, and less often than some enthusiasts would have you believe. A pen in daily use with a standard blue or black ink is happy with a flush every four to six weeks, or each time you refill it. If you always use the same ink and the pen never misbehaves, you can stretch that further. Other situations call for more care:

• Pigment and waterproof inks dry solid inside a feed. Flush every couple of weeks, without fail.
• Shimmer inks leave glitter particles that settle and clog. Treat them the same way.
• Iron gall inks are acidic and best not left sitting in a pen for long periods.
• Any pen going into storage should be flushed first, even if it is only going away for a month.
• The moment it misbehaves. Skipping, hard starts, or ink that suddenly looks darker than usual all point to a feed that needs clearing.

Changing ink colour is another trigger. Flush between colours, or the first few fills of the new ink will come out muddy and disappointing.

What you will need

Nothing you don't already have in a kitchen cupboard.

• Lukewarm water. Not hot — hot water softens and distorts plastic.
• A small bowl or mug, and a second one for clean water.
• Kitchen paper and a soft, lint-free cloth.
• A bulb syringe, if you have one. It makes flushing cartridge pens far quicker.
• Optional: a drop of mild washing-up liquid in a cup of water, for stubborn dried ink.
• Optional: diluted household ammonia — roughly one part ammonia to ten parts water — for ink that has set hard. Skip it for vintage pens, hard rubber, aluminium and plated parts. If in doubt, use plain water.

Flushing the pen, step by step

1. Empty it. Write the last of the ink onto scrap paper, then expel anything remaining into a tissue. Try not to pour ink down the sink; it stains the basin.
2. Remove the cartridge or converter from the section. If you use a converter, keep it — you will need it to draw water.
3. Fill with clean water. Draw water up through the nib into the converter, or work the piston if your pen fills that way, then expel it into the bowl.
4. Repeat until the water runs clear. That usually takes five to ten cycles. Change the bowl water whenever it turns dark; cycling dirty water back through the pen gets you nowhere.
5. No converter? Fit a bulb syringe over the back of the section, where the cartridge normally sits, and push water through. A clean cartridge refilled with water works too, at a push.
6. If your pen has a screw-in nib unit — many modern pens do, and the manual will say so — you can unscrew it and rinse the section directly under a gentle tap. Do not pull a friction-fit nib and feed out. Beginners who try it usually misalign the nib or crack the collar.
7. Blot and check. Press the nib gently onto kitchen paper. A faint grey or yellow tint means ink is still in there; clear water means you are nearly done.

Soaking out dried ink

If the water still runs coloured after flushing, or the pen has sat unused for months, soaking does the work that flushing cannot. Stand the nib and section in a shallow dish of lukewarm water so it covers the nib and feed but does not creep up into the barrel, especially if there is metal trim. Leave it for a few hours, change the water when it darkens, then flush again. A badly neglected pen may need this repeated over two or three days.

Some materials should never be left in water. Hard rubber fades from black to a dull olive-brown, casein and wood swell, and plated or aluminium parts can corrode and cloud. Vintage pens deserve a damp cloth rather than a bath. If a pen is old, rare or valuable, ask a restorer before soaking it.

A stiff piston is a related problem with the same answer: stand the nib end in water for an hour, then work the mechanism gently. Never force it. If it still won't move, stop and let someone experienced take a look.

Drying and reassembling

Rinse with clean water, shake the pen gently over the sink with the nib pointing down, then wrap the nib in kitchen paper and stand it nib-down in a mug with a folded paper towel in the bottom. Capillary action draws the water out of the feed overnight.

Give it at least a few hours, and overnight if you can. A damp feed dilutes your first fill, which makes a perfectly good ink look weak and washed out. Water left sealed inside a pen for weeks can also turn cloudy and grow mould, which is far harder to shift than ink.

Never use a hairdryer, a radiator or a warm oven to speed things up. Heat warps plastic and can ruin a hard rubber barrel in minutes. Air and patience are the only tools you need here.

Once it is dry, refit the converter or a fresh cartridge, screw everything back together hand-tight rather than white-knuckle tight, and write a few lines to get the ink flowing again.

Mistakes that shorten a pen's life

• Hot water. Lukewarm is plenty. Heat damages feeds, barrels and sacs.
• Alcohol, acetone, nail varnish remover or bleach. These attack plastic and strip plating. There is no situation where they are the right answer.
• Pulling the nib and feed out of a pen that wasn't designed for it.
• Soaking the whole pen instead of just the nib end.
• Forcing a piston or converter that has seized.
• Leaving ink to dry for months, then wondering why the pen skips.
• Storing a pen wet, or storing it inked and upright in direct sunlight.

Make it a habit

The simplest routine is to clean your pen whenever you finish a cartridge or bottle-fill, and to keep a bulb syringe and a small bowl in the drawer where you keep your inks. One flush every few weeks takes less time than reading about it, and it means the pen is always ready when you want to write something worth keeping. Do that, and the pen will outlast most of what you write with it.

Photo: SamuelFJohanns / Pixabay