Reviving refills and the Caran d’Ache
A few days ago I found a refill again that I ordered in 2021 and forgot about after moving home. It’s OHTO’s needlepoint gel refill.

There was an air bubble right behind the tip, probably from evaporated ink, so the pen didn’t want to write. Luckily it was easy to pull the tip out without using any tools. You can then just let the gel ink flow down to the end of the cartridge and close it again. I wish I had figured this out earlier, it would have helped me in the past to get other refills going. So far, this is the most effective trick I have discovered to get old gel refills going again. After letting the ink run down to fill up the air gap, writing was dry at first, but a few days later the refill wrote like new.

Back to the actual refill: It puts down a very fine line. The tip looks similar to JetStream’s Edge tip, but writing is much more pleasant. For me the best news was that it fits directly into a Caran d’Ache 849. The not so good news is that I have only been able to find this refill in black so far.

Since we’re talking about Caran d’Ache: it’s probably clear to most, but I only recently spotted that the refills have the date of production stamped on them. New-ish refills seem to be marked in the DD MM YY format. Very old cartridges seem to be marked M YY, written top to bottom.
One last bit of information to share with you: Bleistift.blog was added to a list of the best 20 (English speaking) pencil blogs. Thank you.
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