Refilling Part 3- troubleshooting

The more I thought about refilling, the more I knew I had to talk about, so before I get into refilling with the booster needle, here are some more common questions and concerns people have about refilling. This post is the third part of my segment on refilling.

For those of you interested in my certification classes, there's still room in my Kansas City and Charleston classes, and I'm taking a mailing list for the Seattle and Vancouver BC classes in November.

Refilling Q & A

Q. Do I need to fill both sides of the marker?
A. No. There is one sponge inside. Just fill it and let the marker sit either horizontal or vertical. Ink will seep out to the tips within a few moments. If you want to start coloring right away with one of the dry sides, then you can drip a couple drops of ink onto that nib to encourage ink flow.

Q. How can I tell if I have overfilled?
A. It will blob or drip. After you fill your marker let it sit for a few moments to equal out the ink inside. You may even want to take the caps off both sides to help even out the pressure. Then, scribble with your marker onto a scrap of your good paper. If the marker visibly blobs or seems extra juicy (it spreads and feathers on paper that it usually works fine on) then you've overfilled. If it drips, then you've really overfilled it.

Q. What can I do if I have overfilled?
A. Suck out the excess ink and clean up. On colored markers you can use a paper towel and touch it to the tip to suck out extra ink. If your marker dripped when you tested it check inside the cap to make sure it did not drip in the cap. If it did leave a drip in the cap then with a cotton swab and some alcohol, blender solution, or hand-sanitizer clean out the mess before it cakes on your marker barrel.

If I overfill a blender marker I usually touch the tip of the overfilled marker to a used blender and the ink will flow into the drier marker, or I let it drip back into the large bottle of blender solution.


Q. I am having a really hard time refilling my blender marker from the large blender ink bottle. Any suggestions?
A. Use a standard-size refill bottle for filling empty blenders. Then, refill that small bottle from the large bottle, since there's no way you can tell how little ink to use for refilling off a large bottle. A large bottle holds 200 cc's of blender, so if you're adding 2 cc's to fill a dry marker you're getting 100 refills!

Q. Once my ink bottle is empty, can I recycle it?
A. YES! Although the recycle symbol printed on the bottle is in Japanese, this bottle is recyclable with your other plastics. In the U.S. it's equal to a #2. Or, save your empty bottle, thoroughly rinse it out with rubbing alcohol, and use it for mixing custom colors.