If you are cleaning your fountain pen and noticed that there is ink or water behind the plunger of the converter, you’ll likely find that it’s quite difficult to get at. How do you take apart the converter, clean up that ink, and fully clean your pen?
To make a long story short, very few fountain pen converters come apart easily, but most of them do come apart if you are willing to put some effort into it.
Converter Cleaning Video Tutorial
If you want to take a converter apart the easy way, watch out video demonstration. In this video a Lamy Z28 converter is deconstructed and then cleaned. The whole process will only take a few minutes, once you know how to do it.
While we did use a Lamy converter, the process shouldn’t be much different for a Pilot, Platinum, standard international, or any other pen type you might have lying around.
Steps To Cleaning Behind The Piston Seal
- Remove the converter from your pen
- Clean out the converter with water to get as much ink out as possible
- Empty any water inside and dry the outside of the converter
- Find a latex glove, rubber grip strip, or something similar to grip the converter. Don’t use pliers or any form of tool to do this, you’ll damage the converter
- Firmly hold the lower end of the converter (the part that goes down into the pen) with your hand and use the grippy rubber/latex to pull the metal cover off
- Separate the piston mechanism from the lower tube part. Be careful to pull the top of the piston housing not the twisting handle or the threaded rod
- With the piston removed you can clean out the inside of the converter with a paper towel, q-tip, or something similar
- Put all the parts back together being careful everything is full sealed before adding ink
If you have any confusion with these instructions, please refer to the video or the annotated image above.
Any with that you should have a fully cleaned converter, both on the inside (on both sides of the seal) and out.