Another PCD! My Platinum Loyalty

I quickly gave some of my pens a quick bath down at my kitchen sink. I’m back in my studio tending to my pens for the rest of my Pen Cleaning Day process.

I scanned my PCD bin and saw that they were mostly my lovely Platinum pens. I Love My Platinum Fountain Pens! There I said it. I just promoted my devotion to this brand. Platinum has now become number one in book. It’s unseated my previous number one…Pilot. Now. I’m talking about Japanese pen brands.

So how does a brand rank for me? We all know that nib swapping is important to me. I have to omit this pen function for Japanese brands. So, we all know that Japanese nibs can not be swapped around. Many of the brands have warnings. Voided warranties. Break the pen while trying to pull out nibs, twisting out nib units, or break the feed…not covered under their warranties.

The other pen function that is important to me is cleaning and maintenance. If I can’t take apart my pen, how easy is it? To clean. Not just regular ink, how about shimmers?

Today, I found this out with my Platinum pens. Specifically my Platinum Prefountes. I had my Jacques Herbin Cornaline de Egypte ink in my Prefounte from the beginning of August of this year. That’s four months that this shimmering ink has been sitting in my Prefounte pen. I had also converted this pen to an eyedropper pen. I used it every now and then. Maybe every two weeks. When I would need to use an orange shimmering ink for writing or sketching. The Prefounte wrote brilliantly when I put the nib to paper. No hard starts or drying out. That’s because of the Platinum “slip ‘n seal” caps.

I should add that I kept my Prefountes lying around on my desk. Horizontal. No storing nibs up in this case.

You can see all the orange shimmers in the section. My thoughts were this will take some time to get all this out.

Four months of shimmering ink in this pen. No problem.

After the bath, I placed the section nib down into a jar filled with paper towels. I used my pipette to drop water into the section and let the water do its thing. Thirty minutes later and to my amazement, the section is clear of most shimmers or ink residuals. It bled out into my paper towel.

Look at all the ink that flowed out from the section!

Now, I have two additional Prefountes that had been filled with normal ink (from the end of September) and you can see the sections are filled with ink.

Here the blue inks made their way throughout the whole section of my pen. Don’t forget to clean the rubber rings.

You can actually see the ink being pulled from the nib onto the paper towel. I drop water into the top of the sections and let the water flow out through the nib.

Now your mileage may vary on how easy it is to clean fountain pens. Like the Jacques Herbin shimmering inks are light with their shimmering particles. I do have additional Prefountes filled with Diamine shimmering inks. Filled around the same time I used my Cornaline de Egypte ink. I will report back how well the Diamine shimmers clean out of those pens. My goal for the end of this year is to give my remaining inked pens a good bath.

My current pens that ended up getting their spa treatments: Platinum 3776 Century Chartres Blue, Platinum Procyon Luster Rose Gold, Platinum Prefounte, Montegrappa Elmo Blue Cross Gentian, and TWSBI Vac Mini.