Checking the ink level in Cross Converters

Cross has made it extremely easy to check the ink level in your fountain pen! When unthreading the barrel of the pen, it twists the top of the converter, depressing the piston, and ejects the ink remaining in your pen onto the surface of your desk where you can easily gauge how much was left in the pen.

This is such a great feature I can't believe they don't advertise it on the converter's packaging!

Cats are also handy for judging how much ink was left

Sounds like there's a story behind that! What colour did the cat end up?

No story till we see pics!

Luckily I have a writing pad on top of my desk, so clean up was easy and the spill ended up being harmless.

No pics?

I don't check my ink level, I just put the metal to the paper till I'm running on empty!

Chris Murphy said:

Luckily I have a writing pad on top of my desk, so clean up was easy and the spill ended up being harmless.

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So it's a classic case of:

Chris Murphy said:

Sounds like there's a story behind that! What colour did the cat end up?

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Canadian Hockey Puck Blue....

Holy crap! I about peed myself! thank you for that.

Someone from the land up over had an accident involving a cat.

What kind of Cross? I'm thinking of purchasing a Cross Townsend & converter... you might change my mind.

Mine is a Century II, which since pairing with the converter and a fine nib I absolutely love. The medium was too wet for my writing, at least combined with the cross cartridges (I burned through them in nothing flat). I'll try my medium again in the future and see if it behaves differently with the converter and different ink.

The Townsend uses a different converter than my pen. I would send Cross an email and ask, because it was clearly designed to do this on my pen, there is a facet/socket in the barrel of the pen and the end of the converter is shaped to clip into it, I guess the idea is that you don't have to twist the plunger down before refilling, you might not even have to take the barrel off at all to refill, as I think the converter plunger only took 1 or 2 turns to travel completely up or down, but I haven't confirmed this. The converter also threads in, and seems much better made than other converters I've seen.

It looks like about 30 seconds with some sandpaper or a file would slim down the tip of the converter enough so this wouldn't happen, which I will probably do in the near future.

Which Townsend are you thinking of? The black lacquer and Rhodium is to die for in my opinion.

I just did a little googling, and this may not in fact be the intended operation of the pen, once I run it down I'll have to investigate further.

Those are not in my price range at the moment... I'm looking at polished chrome with 23 k trim.

Don't get too spooked by the Cross MSRP, at least when I bought my Century about 5 years ago you could find most models for about half the website value. The chrome looks great too.

Finally ran my pen down enough to take it apart again today without wasting too much ink; I'm pressed with the capacity of the cross converters compared to how fast I would go through cartridges.

There is a spring which appears to be glued into the barrel, my guess is to push cartridges down. The spring is slightly off center, and applies pressure to the converter, grabbing and turning the converter. After a little googling it appears the spring isn't too hard to remove, and as I don't plan on ever going back to cartridges with this pen, I'll be pulling it later this week. It's just held in with a little bit of glue, most people just yank it out, but I think I'll try heating it a little first to make my life a little easier.

I'll update once I get it out.

I had a few free minutes today, so I soaked the barrel of the pen in hot water for a couple minutes, then hooked the spring with a dental pick and gave it a wee tug. It came out quite easily, and seems to have been held in with a dab of rubber cement or some other flexible adhesive.

It looks like the spring was intended to slip around the converter, however on my pen it wasn't quite centered, so it interfered with the converter. From what I've read I'm sure cross would have sorted this out, and most people don't seem to experience this problem.

Anyway, my pen no longer auto-empties when I take the barrel off, so I am happy.

Cross make nice pens. At least you have a fix for it and can happily use it without getting ink everywhere.