Wow, that’s awesome! I mean yeah I’m sorry to hear your ink faded in the heat, but at least some good came out of it: that’s a whole new mode of failure I didn’t know about. Hey, maybe I’ll try putting a test page in the oven’s warming drawer or something.
Oh, neat, Mastodon! I didn’t know for sure whether this was reaching Mastodon. I only posted the one image. I didn’t know I could post multiple images. Now, I know not to try, for compatibility reasons.
Printer ink is useful because each of the C, M, and Y inks is a perfect filter of exactly one colour. C filters red, M filters green, and Y filters blue. Commercial fountain pen inks almost never have this kind of absorptive specificity. They’re usually a mix of two or more dyes—a mix that you don’t control. Once a dye is in the mix, you can’t just take it out. The best you could do is dim all of the other colours, but then you lose saturation.
Here’s a specific example. Suppose you have a commercial ink of 5C:1M and you want pure C. You’re stuck with that 1M. The best you can do is add 1Y to make 5C:1M:1Y = 4C:1K. You’ve got a balanced C, but that extra 1K is going to make everything look a little grey. Ew. And that is assuming you can even get pure Y in the first place. No ink manufacturer in their right mind would try to sell a pure Y on purpose. It is very difficult to read. (Except under a pure blue light. It’s super awesome actually. This has been an underhanded privacy-invading tactic of the government for some time now. Yellow microdots are printed on all commercial inkjet printouts.)
These inks have also been designed to be mutually equally absorptive of their respective light wavelengths, so an equal ratio of 1C:1Y makes a perfectly balanced green. These inks has also been designed to stay in solution even when mixed. There are no chemical reactions that could cause precipitate to form, thus totally fucking the pen. Achieving this with commercial fountain pen inks would be difficult, and potentially dangerous.
However.
That’s actually not the reason why I started using printer ink. I was in Oulu, I had just run out of fountain pen ink, and all I could find was a print shop. Here is the whole story of my Oulu trip.I did a little research online before actually doing it. Other people have done it before. You just have to make sure to use dye-based ink and not pigment-based ink. I was able to confirm from Timi that it was dye-based. And prepare for the possibility of having accidentally turned your pen into an ink firehose because printer ink bleeds like three motherfuckers. It needs at least three parts water to calm it down.
Well, I can comment on water damage. My printer ink is totally immune, and so is the Platinum carbon black. I don’t trust the black in felt tips, but the printer ink would be fine. Probably. My printer ink has a curious property of being perfectly water soluble until absorbed by certain materials including paper and fabric, after which it becomes pretty darned permanent.
UV damage, well, if my ink dyes are the same as in the UV faded inkjet printouts I see taped to the windows of abandoned storefronts, then that will be a problem if I decided to put the pages of my notebook on display in direct sunlight. I’ve never done that or have been compelled to do it, but never say never, I guess.
That’s a good question, though. Have you lost data to sunbeams before, or is this more of a hypothetical?
Hm. Thanks for the link. This could help me with my ink mixes. Oh, one thing that annoys me: I wish I had pure CMY dyes without surfactant in them, so that I could change the surfactant level and not make the ink so god damned bloody. But I have no fucking clue where I could find CMY dyes without the surfactant.
LUKS is full hard drive encryption. If you encrypt your entire hard drive with a yubi key, then lose the yubi key, and you have no backup, you’re shit outta luck. I encrypted my hard drives with a USB drive in a similar fashion. Then made backups of the USB drive, so that the scenario I describe wouldn’t happen. Hopefully. It’s kind of like horcruxes. If somebody steals them all, I become mortal again. Actually, though, if somebody steals them all, I lose all of the data on the hard drive.
Yeah, I know. Like I told the other guy, it’s a stock image. An image of the real pen wouldn’t add anything except ink in the window, and I can’t take a better picture than whoever did the stock image. The ink in the window looks entirely unremarkable.
…
/me looks at ink in the window for five minutes with a bright light backlighting the window.
…
Yeah, the ink in there is entirely unremarkable. It’s just grey air bubbles and black water. IDK, you want a picture of the ink window anyway?
And very dangerous. If anything happens to my USB drives and all of my many (many many many) backups, they are bricked to me too. My LUKS keys are on that USB drive. And the backups.
30 water : 1 platinum carbon black : 5 yellow : 5 magenta is the mix for octarine.
But seriously, 30 water : 1 platinum carbon black : 10 printer ink is a good starting point for mixing. That is about how sensitive the mix is to each type of ink. Pure printer ink won’t ruin the pen, but it bleeds like a motherfucker. If you don’t care about the next five pieces of paper, though, you can do some pretty cool stuff with it.