How to fill your fountain pen correctly
An important point toi remember when purchasing a fountain pen is that you need to know how to fill the fountain pen correctly. Filling your pen with ink may sound like a pushover, but you have to take great care when doing it. It can be an easy process, or a tedious, messy process depending upon what you know about the filling system of your fountain pen. And if it is not done correctly, you could ultimately damage your pen.
There are more than 20 ways to fill ink for your fountain pen. Filling ink is not just dropping the bottle of ink on to your fountain pen. Different kinds of Fountain pens have different filling systems. You need to know the filling system of your fountain pen before buying it. Some of the common filling systems used in fountain pens are lever fill, button fill, piston fill, eye dropper fillers, vacumatic system, aerometric system, capillary system, aerometric converters, piston converters, refill cartridges… Did you hold your breath?
Here are some famous filling systems from some of the famous fountain pen models to help you determine your filling system.
For cartridge pens, you can simply unscrew the barrel, pull out the old cartridge and put the new cartridge in. A bottle fill converter goes well with cartridge pens.
- Converters can be fit inside a cartridge pen and they allow you to fill ink from a bottle. There are two types of converters; aerometric converters, which are made popular by Parker, and piston converters.
Aerometric fillers have a rubber sac inside a metal sheath. To fill the pen, you have to dip the pen inside the ink surface and then press the sac and allow it to expand and draw ink from the bottle.
Piston fillers are common in Waterman and Mont Blanc pens. To fill your pen, you have to dip it in ink and twist the piston so that it goes down, and then pull it up to draw the ink. These are transparent and you can always check your ink quantity.
- There are also pens like Pelikan which use only piston filler by almost the same method.Eye dropper is meant for very old pens. You simply unscrew the barrel, draw ink in an eye dropper and fill up your pen.
In most of the sac pens, you have lever fill and button fill systems. The lever has to be flipped to 90° and put back to fill ink.
The button system is even easier. You have to hold the button down to expel old ink and dip it in ink to draw new ink.
These are some of the most famous filling systems. Depending on your pen’s facility, you can choose any of these and make your ink filling an easy process.