The
Centrifugal Pen Cleaner – An Afternoon’s Diversion
Ron
Lee, Victor Chen, Roger Cromwell
Recently there was an Ebay auction for a
Parker Whirl-Clean (item #4957354599) with a discussion on the Zoss
pen list. David Issacson provided a very nice picture (http://www.vacumania.com/penteach/whirlclean.jpg)
and it got me thinking. Could I make one? I posed the challenge to Victor Chen
and Roger Cromwell of Penopoly.
I was meeting with Roger the next day and we started
to figure out how to take a motor, machine a platter to mount the pen, etc.
Victor showed up and said we were all wrong. There is a much simpler way to do
it. He suggested building it around a salad spinner. (For those of us who do
not inhabit kitchens, a salad spinner is a kitchen gadget. When you make a
salad, you need to wash the lettuce but don’t want all that extra water
remaining to dilute your dressing. In the old days you would dry the lettuce
with a towel. Some bright person figured out if you put it in a basket and spun
it around, the water would fly out.) If you place the pen in the basket and
spin it around, the ink will fly right out!
We immediately raided Roger’s kitchen and made off
with his wife’s salad spinner. Looking at how it was built, we figured it would
do the job. Still thinking about designing and building, we figured that if we
removed the basket, we could attach the pen to the part of the lid that spins
and the ink will come flowing out. Great! However since we could not keep
Roger’s wife’s salad spinner we went to Bed, Bath and Beyond in search of a
salad spinner.
Bed, Bath and Beyond is one of Roger’s favorite
stores for tools, gadgets and such. We found two sizes of salad spinners.
Prices ranged from ten to thirty dollars depending on how fancy you wanted to
get. We settled on the smaller twenty -dollar unit. Roger was still thinking of
mounting the pen on the lid. I looked at things and said why not put the pen in
the basket part? We looked around the kitchen gadget department for something
to put the pen in. Roger reached up on a nearby shelf and grabbed a butter
dish. It fit in the basket of the larger salad spinners. Not bad. You could put
your pen in the butter dish, add some sponge or paper towel to absorb the ink
and cushion the nib and you’re set. We purchased everything and took it back to
Roger’s shop.
It was late in the day but we had to try it out. I
was still arguing with Roger that we could put the pen in the basket. Looking
around his shop we found a piece of PVC pipe used to ship a pen. Building a
quick prototype, we put a pen in the tube, added a wad of paper towel to each
end, and taped it shut. We tried it with a full Parker 61 capillary flow. Two
quick pumps of the spinner and the pen was empty! Not bad.
So now we had simplified our design down to a piece
of PVC pipe sitting in the basket of a salad spinner. You need to make sure
that the pipe and the pen are somewhat balanced. If it is heavier on one side,
the salad spinner will vibrate when you spin it. You also want to make sure the
pen is a little off center so centrifugal forces push the ink out the nib and
not into the bottom of the sac. In the case of the Parker 61 we put only the
section into the tube and had paper towel on both ends. We placed it closer to
one end of the pipe so all of the ink came out of the nib. It works great.
If you want to get fancier you can find clear
plastic tubing, use sponges instead of paper towels and make a real end for the
tubes instead of using tape. Happy pen cleaning!
Credits:
Whirl Clean photo – David Issacson