Some ink is not permanent

I’ve been writing up old episodes of The Pen Addict in my Field Notes, using a brown Pilot G-TEC C4, but since a scrap of Whitelines paper got mixed up with the shopping I realize this is not waterproof.(These are iOS apps I’m rating for another Twitter account.) So I have switched to using a pigment ink in a drawing pen, the popular Staedtler pigment liner 0.05. This writes a finer line, but needs a lighter touch than the metal needlepoint of the Pilot G-TEC 0.4. At least I’ll be able to read it after any water damage. Swings and roundabouts!

The Staedtler soon ran dry. Well, I’ve had it for decades. I didn’t have any pigment ink handy so I switched to using a similarly indelible/archival Sakura Pigma Micron, also with a 0.05 tip. The Micron leaves a broader line on the paper and feels slightly softer, so I’m using an even lighter touch than with the Staedtler. This is not conducive to long writing sessions, although writing-up old Pen Addict episodes in Field Notes notebooks is a bit of spare time fun for me.So how to refill the Staedtler? My solution was to use a waterproof fountain pen ink. I could not manage to open the pen at either end. As with most of these pens, the fibre tip is within a metal collar that is mounted on a plastic cylinder that protrudes from inside the barrel. Around the cylinder there is a gap, presumably so air can replace the ink in the (fibrous?) reservoir. Using a syringe, I decanted drops of Noodler’s Green Gator ink down the side of the cylinder. About 1 ml of ink disappeared inside and shows no inclination to come out again, except through the tip which is what I want! So now it writes in green ink!

I think now I should have a look to see if anyone has compared all the 0.05 pens out there. If not, there’s a blog post in the making.

Water damage is not the only problem with notebooks. They can go walkies. A tip from Stephen Hackett via The Pen Addict podcast #11: backup your notebooks. I lost one which had my eBay price notes inside: luckily I had captured  an image of one page while photographing a pen so all was not lost. Scan (or just photograph) each page. If your writing is neat, you could even use Evernote OCR to convert the text to digital form and make it searchable.

Of course, your computer is backed up online and in more than one place so you can never lose that data, right!?