 I've been using rubbing alcohol to clean pilot metropolitan's fine and medium nibs when stuff's been dried in there and as an intermediate rinse or short soak when I realized water wasn't getting everything out I had assured it would be safer than ammonia I sorry I had assumed it would be safer than ammonia or bleach but this was apparently very wrong have I ruined our pens just the squishy inkwell part is this why some of the cartridges seem to leak if I try to reuse the regular pilot cartridge with diamond or a rocha zuku ink all right lorinda this happens this you're not the only one and I've actually talked about this fairly recently but still I want to talk about it again because it's important so basically yeah I don't use rubbing alcohol to clean your pens it's it's not good especially soaking it that's probably what did you in some people will use rubbing alcohol and they'll say it's fine probably they just haven't used it very much or they've only used it to flush it essentially the here's the problem the rubbing alcohol itself is not necessarily what's causing the damage to your pens what's doing it is the acetone so basically there is acetone which is put into rubbing alcohol as essentially a poisonous additive so that people won't drink it you know because otherwise rubbing alcohol would be you know without the additives like the methyl ketones and the I think that no methyl ketone I don't know there's a crazy chemical name then the acetone is the other really bad one without those in there would be like grain alcohol you know get you really drunk but yeah you don't want that so essentially when they did prohibition back in the whatever early 1900s when was it yeah it was that time yeah because of 1920s and all that but around that time that's when they started to put those additives into rubbing alcohol because they wanted all alcohols to be banned so they started putting that in there but then prohibition ended they still just kept putting that stuff into the rubbing alcohol so it's still there today so that's what's causing problems acetone essentially melts plastic so acrylic acetate is one type of resin that's what is you know like Edison pens and stuff or made out of acrylic acetate acetone is the solvent that dissolves acrylic acetate so you literally if you soak this pen in acid if you soak in pure acetone it's going to melt completely very quickly if you soak in rubbing alcohol it's going to melt eventually because there's not a lot of acetone in there but it's enough that it's going to cause some problems over time so that is basically what's happened with your pen metropolitan here it's mainly made of metal but the grip and the feed are made of some form of plastic which is you know basically some sort of acrylic so yeah essentially I think the acetone has eaten away or melted part of your pen so I'm not saying like that without seeing it or knowing anything more about it I can't say like that's the reason why your pen is leaking but I can say pretty much like yep if that's what you've done that is immediately what I would point to as being a problem there's nothing about using diamond or a rochezouk ink in a pilot cartridge that would that would well or a converter that would be a problem the one thing I could say is maybe if you haven't damaged your pen just if you've been using cartridges and you have the converter make sure you have that converter pushed onto the back because it can if you're not very familiar with the pens it can take a little more pressure than you realize to kind of push it on there you might be a little afraid but don't be afraid just push it in there if you've been using cartridges you know you have to kind of give those a little bit of force it's the same thing with the converter so it could be that maybe you just have it kind of sitting on there and it's not seated tight enough and especially if it's leaking out of the back here that could be causing it so just make sure that your converter is pushed in there if that's not it or if you see any kind of visible wear or anything like that it might be the acetone and you can actually pull the nib and feed out of this pen like so just kind of grab it with your fingers like like that on the top and the bottom of the nib and you can pull it out and see if there's any like weird like smokey color or any melting or weird you know just general not healthiness going on with your feed because that is what would probably call as most of your issues would be the feed so that's where we're at but in general yeah bleach bleach is is something you don't want to use like as a go-to especially straight bleach you want to dilute it pretty heavily bleach is not great for stainless steel it's okay if you just kind of flush it a little bit here and there but you don't want to use it all the time and you definitely don't want to soak it ammonia though is actually the safest of all of these use a dilution so take like a household ammonia into 10 percent a 10 percent solution into 90 percent water and then use that to flush your pen that's a very common kind of talked about thing that a lot of people use with vintage pens and other things like that very common like restorative type of thing that people use when it gets kind of dried out in the pen that's also the basis for our gulet pen flush as well it's an ammonia base so that's you know pretty darn safe for most fountain pens much safer than rubbing alcohol so take that in mind and pass it along to your friends we don't want anybody anybody doing anything to their pens that's gonna be bad so