 Well, hi there, it's Sandy Allnock and today I'm going to talk about unsticking stuck gel pens. I am the queen of the white gel pen. I love using mine and recently I did a tiny tutorial on my Instagram account in which I looked up a bunch of different advice for how to unstick stuck gel pens and shared it with everybody and I'm going to test out some of these methods right here and now and we'll see if they work. I don't tend to have as much trouble with them so we shall see. So gel pens have ink that's suspended in a gel that pushes a plenty, plenty, plenty of coverage on the paper so they're used up quickly. That's just the nature of gel pens. They can have really bright colored pigments and sparkly metallics and if you think about sparkle it's particles so it's gonna also help your gel pens to jam. The writing point sends the ink over top of a little teeny tiny ball which is really super small and if the ink doesn't have room to flow around it, if you're pressing really hard that will also keep it from running. A little weird fun fact that I found that gel pens resist the analytical method that the FBI uses to assess the age of ink for forensic purposes so I'll just throw that out there. It's just a weird fact. All right storage tips they say to clean excess ink on your pen tips with a damp cloth before putting them away and secure them and store them with the tips facing down or lying flat. Now I don't clean mine and I store them tips up and I don't have nearly as much trouble as everybody else says they do so I don't know how true this is but I'll put it out there because that's what they quote they say. Your day-to-day method that I've used all the time is to hold the back of the pen and shake it. Now they say they say I keep saying they to hold it like you would a thermometer. If you're old like me you'll know that you shake it at on its side as opposed to like stabbing it at the ground and you can also get it started on a soft warm surface like your hands so right on your finger to get it started. You can use the disassembly method unscrew the top which is really easy to do they say pliers I did it without pliers easily pull that whole ink tube out add a little bit of water to the back end and blow air into it and then just reassemble the pen. It's a relatively painless process and then there's the melting method which I'll try also in this soaking the pen in warm water for five minutes which was too long for me to deal with so I held it over a steaming tea kettle to try to melt the dried ink inside and I had some mixed results so if you get it wet you want to dry it completely so that you don't end up getting any of the metal parts in your pen corroded. Well I have a cup full of pens I always have a cup full of pens I always buy extras especially when winter is coming and I'm going to be doing a lot of snow art using my gel pen or if I'm going to do a class and I'm going to use white gel pens because I do have some classes using that you know I buy extras I buy them by the tens because I like these pens a lot. The ones that I have are the Uniball Signo gel pens and a lot of people struggle with these but I think this advice probably goes for any gel pen. I found a lot of it on different manufacturers website so it's their best information and other places that just had different tips and I just put it all together into one collection to give people more ideas on how to save their gel pens. So I'm going through and splitting my pens into the pen pile that could do well and the pen pile that did not do so well. These last two that I'm writing with are a thinner line you'll notice and that's because it's a different pen these are both Uniball gel pens they both say they're a .1 I don't know if the .1 actually refers to anything but they have different UPC codes I will type those out on my blog and give you links to both pens so that you can try each one because one writes thinner than the other. So now I'm going to test each one of the pens that did not work using the shaking method. Now the shaking I did first was the way we normally shake pens the shaking it toward the paper as opposed to the thermometer method which I read about so I'm trying the thermometer method on each one too and seeing if just a good shake on any of these pens gets it going because when I did my first test I just tested them right out of the pen cup to see what would happen and we're not seeing much of any good results whatsoever so shaking was not helpful on these. So I started writing on my finger which I find to be the best method for me to get it started and for some of these it worked well and for some it didn't but I looked at the ink level that you can see inside the pen and a lot of them are just really low on ink and that's just the way it is because I use my white pens a lot and I don't use one until it runs out and then move to another I just grab one from the cup and some of them would write on my finger quite easily and then would run out you know it just wouldn't continue on the paper but there was limited ink in the pen body itself for the most part so always check to see if there's any ink left before you start getting real frustrated because if it's out ain't nothing gonna really help with that. So this one was very scratchy and I could feel the scratchiness on my finger I could hear the scratchiness on the paper and it helped a little bit to write it on my finger but it had a lot of ink in it so there's something wrong here with the nib itself so I tried cleaning it off with a baby wipe to just see if if there was just something crusty on the tip of it and that didn't help at all so rewrite on my hand again to see if I could get something going and nothing nothing on the finger but a little bit started coming out it definitely needed a little more assistance it got a little bit better with time but it just felt like it was scratchy so I labeled it it's Mr. Scratchy so moving on to the next ones this one just didn't really give me any ink at all on my finger and guess what it's empty it just has nothing in it so that tells you a whole lot buck naked I labeled it buck naked because I'm gonna do the next test with it anyway even if it looks buck naked to me so then I took the last one tried writing on my finger my fingers getting tired by now of being written on it's feeling used and abused but there seems to be some dry ink in there but who knows how much of it is movable so we're gonna move on to the kitchen and go turn on the heat and see if we can get something going and save any of these pens so I got it all cooking up and started putting the pens for oh 10 15 seconds or so into the steam coming out and yes I risked life and limb for this because my tea kettle leaks air all over the place so my hand kept getting warm and toasty but I tried with each one of them to hold them in the heat for a good enough time to try to see if I could get it to melt I did a little bit of testing right away but I didn't really want to count on that because if I were to use this method I would want it to last all the way into my studio I wouldn't want to have to sit in the kitchen and keep sticking it under heat so I will go test in there but while you're in the kitchen making some hot water make yourself a cup of cider or tea or hot cocoa or something because it's that time of year so let's test out all the pens and we shall begin with mr. scratchy who yeah he started out okay and then just started getting a little funky so a lot of these methods as you get more serious with them they may not work when you get to the last methods they might be might be dodgy but you can also leave them in your pencil cup and a lot of them even if they don't write a fair line you could make snow with them you could pounce it on the paper and get enough ink to make some snow out of it for a piece of artwork but lookie here one of them fixed itself one of them has plenty of ink working and then we come to another one it was just hit or miss as to whether or not these pens could be recovered but the last one also worked which was great and exciting news so now I'm left with the ones that did not work under the heat test and I wanted to see if putting a little moisture in there putting a couple drops of water into that barrel it's empty at one end it's open at one end and then blow in it and that actually worked okay it took a little while to get it worked up on the paper and it never did get a really super nice thick white like some of the brand new pens do but it's going to work for some projects so I'm going to call it good it just it needed a whole lot more play time to try to get it to be a little more consistent so that is my experiments with trying to fix gel pens try these things out and if you find any other things that work aside from throwing them away then leave them in the comments so other people who come and see this video can find some other ideas as well all right I will see you guys again soon take care bye bye