The stress of the last few weeks has given me a slowdown, and when it comes to art or physics, I can't do very much. I seem to have forgotten everything I tried to learn about sliding blocks or F= ma or gravity. So what do I do? I do the dumb tasks that I left undone while I was preparing for the art show.

I'm sure that some people hold artists in as much awe and esteem as I hold physicists. They think artists do magic just the way I think physicists work with arcane power and knowledge. So I will share an insight into what artists really do. They wash equipment. At least I do. The most annoying task which I left undone during the busy months was cleaning the rapidograph pens.

Rapidograph technical pens have been around for a long time now. Even in an age of digital imaging, these thin-pointed pens are still standard equipment in many drafting studios. They are basically fountain pens with an ink reservoir and a small, straight, unyielding tubular point, which can range from about a millimeter at the largest, to superfine hair-thin lines. They use a pen-ready, thinner form of old-fashioned black or brown India ink, as well as pigmented colored inks. They are easy to draw along rulers and straightedges, and they don't bend, which makes them ideal for technical and architectural drawing. But if you want a changeable, expressive line, this is not the pen to use.

I've used them for decades, mostly for architectural drawing. I used to use them for sketching on-site, but they don't travel well; they leak at the slightest motion or change in air pressure. In the last ten years, fiber-tip markers such as the excellent "Pitt" series by Faber-Castell of Germany have become my first choice for on-site sketching. But in the studio, the Rapidographs are still the ones to use.

Anyone who has used Rapidographs, though, knows that they are temperamental and clog easily. If you leave one uncapped for more than a minute or so, it dries up and becomes frustratingly unusable. They also don't like rougher paper; they perform best on smooth surfaces. And they can suddenly glop, too, releasing a curse-inducing blob of ink onto your perfectly drawn rendering.

To prevent this and keep the pens working properly, you have to worship them. Well, not really, though I used to refer to Rapidograph maintenance as "worship" because you have to be devoted to it. They just won't work if you don't clean them. I do this every few months, as long as the pen is in use and has ink in it.

To clean a Rapidograph, you must disassemble it into its tiny parts, including miniature plastic tubes most of which are fastened together by clips or screw helixes in the cylinders. The point itself comes apart into the tube point and the delicate wire inside which guides the ink down the tube. If the point is thin, the wire is also very thin and easy to break.

I take apart the pens in a sink, with a drain stopper that allows water through but will catch small pen parts that roll towards the drain. I run a trickling stream of lukewarm water to wash the pen parts in. Once disassembled, the point and ink reservoir yield black streams of ink as they are purified. You might think that only the most delicate of instruments and cleaners could be used on these pens, but surprisingly, I use rough brushes, bottle-washers, strong detergent, and even bleach-enhanced scouring powder on the plastic pen parts. This treatment doesn't seem to damage the points, as I have maintained some well-used individual Rapidograph points for more than ten years.

Once I've gone through the job of cleaning and shaking all ink out of the pens until water running through them is clear, I then wrap the disassembled pen parts in paper towels and bring them into my studio, where I gently dry them with tissue paper. Then I lay the aggregated parts out on the paper towels to air-dry. Each pen is now a handful of tubes and connectors, carefully sorted out to match. I leave them unassembled for a day or so, and then re-assemble them for further use. I will be re-assembling things later today as I return to studio work. My clean pens remain empty until ready to be used again, kind of like my brain right now.

Posted at 3:44 am | link