A fountain pen nib pressing on a dark surface

You may notice yourself writing with a fountain pen one mean solar day, and it stops working as it should.

Every then often, fountain pens tin autumn victim to dryness, which results in scratchy and patchy handwriting. You may also notice that the ink dries lighter than it usually does.

This could be because the pen has been in storage and unused for a while, or it could just randomly happen when y'all've been using it regularly for months.

Worry not though — this issue can easily be remedied using the tips below.

However, it is worth begetting in heed before purchase that pens with extra-fine nibs will be decumbent to suffer from this problem more than often, every bit a effectively bill means less ink and therefore less moisture for lubrication.

And so, let's look at how y'all can solve your dry pen outcome.

Apply pressure to the cartridge

If you lot are using ink cartridges, or a converter, you can assist the ink in its journey past unscrewing the pen grip and lightly squeezing the far end of the cartridge or converter.

This process forces ink through the feed, and you tin can keep every bit usual once the ink has appeared on the nib (although y'all may need to clean the backlog off showtime).

You lot may need to do this with a make-new pen as well as your quondam favourites.

Clean your fountain pen

Dry writing can be an indicator of a chock-full feed system, and so a simple step is to disassemble your fountain pen and flush the feed system with warm, clean water.

If this fixes the trouble, y'all will accept probably shifted some dried ink or some other blockage.

Y'all can avoid this happening once again in the future by cleaning your fountain pens regularly and earlier storing them for long periods.

This web log post is all about cleaning your fountain pen nib.

Switch to wetter ink

a fountain pen nib with handwriting on paper

Both bottled fountain pen ink and cartridge ink varies in its flow.

Some inks are thicker than others, and some incorporate particles — both of which can contribute to blockages over time.

If this is causing y'all bug, you can regularly flush your fountain pen feed.

Still, you can prevent the issue altogether by switching to a wetter ink.

Wetter inks you could try include Sailor Jentle and most of the Diamine ink collection.

Switch to a unlike paper blazon

Your newspaper choice can make all the deviation when it comes to how your fountain pen writes.

If you have recently inverse to a new paper blazon, that could be your problem.

Test your pen out on your usual paper blazon to eliminate or confirm this as the issue.

Bearing beak width in listen, the width of the lines you create when writing can indicate how absorbent the paper is.

More than absorbent paper will result in a thicker line, as it drinks the moisture in and spreads it out.

If yous are writing on an unabsorbent paper type, the line produced will be thinner, and the pen may struggle to make whatsoever line at all.

Make beak alterations

I don't recommend you make alterations to a nib yourself, only yous could reach out to a pecker meister if you experience similar your nib would benefit from some work.

Even so, if yous do wish to brand small changes yourself — perhaps it is a cheap fountain pen y'all are using which holds no sentimental value — the goal for a wetter pen is to increase the size of the gap betwixt the tines, equally, all the way from its start to its finish.

Some people achieve this by gently using a razor blade or dental floss betwixt the tines, only I'd personally rather you didn't!

If none of the above tips have helped and you bought the pen from the states, please do get in affect and nosotros can work together to get your pen working exactly how you'd like it to.

Every bit a long-term stationery lover, I admire working for The Pen Company. My childhood saw me conveying around a little red briefcase covered in stickers and full of pens, newspaper and other such goodies; my adulthood sees me doing pretty much exactly the same!