Pen rotation schedule
A rotation schedule for a collection too big to ink at once.
Cap the pens you keep inked, ink the longest-idle one next, and flush on a clock set by the ink and not by the mood. The free CSV holds the dates.
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Inked right now
6 of 12TWSBI Eco
Robert Oster Fire and Ice · EF
Inked 38 days — longest fill on the desk
Sailor Pro Gear
Rohrer & Klingner Salix · MF
Iron gall — flush by October 7
Lamy 2000
Waterman Serenity Blue · F
Past its flush date by 17 days
TWSBI Diamond 580
Clean · stub 1.1
Idle 105 days — ink this one next
The problem a rotation solves
Past roughly 15 pens, two things stop happening on their own. Pens at the back of the stash never get inked, because choosing is work and the pen already on the desk is not. And pens that did get inked sit loaded for months, because nothing tells you how long it has been.
Both failures have the same cause: the date a pen was filled lives nowhere. A rotation schedule is not a hobby ritual. It is the record of that one date, plus a rule for what to do with it.
Collectors who post about this mostly land in the same place: keep somewhere between 3 and 8 pens inked at a time. Below 3 there is nothing to rotate between; above 8 the fills outlast your ability to use them, and the back half dries out unused.
The rule, in 3 lines
- Cap the inked count. Pick a number between 3 and 8 and hold it. A pen only gets inked when another one comes out.
- Ink the longest-idle pen next. Sort the clean pens by last_flushed and take the oldest. The decision is made by the column, not by you.
- Flush on the ink's clock. When a pen passes its flush_by date it comes out, whether or not the fill is finished. That is what frees a slot.
Longest-idle-first is the whole trick. It is the only rule that gets every pen in the stash used. A pen that keeps losing the choice keeps rising up the sort.
How long a fill can stay in
A pen in daily use can stay inked until the fill runs out. A pen you might not touch for a fortnight is on a clock, and the clock is set by the ink. These are working intervals, not laws — shorten them in a dry or hot room.
- Standard dye ink
- 6 weeks
- The forgiving case. A well-sealed piston filler holds this longer; a converter does not.
- Iron gall
- 4 weeks
- It is mildly acidic and it dries hard. Do not let a fill evaporate in the feed.
- Pigmented
- 4 weeks
- Carbon particles settle and block a feed. Fill it for a stretch of daily use, not for a drawer.
- Shimmer
- 4 weeks
- The particles sink. Agitate before writing and flush before they cake.
Set flush_by once, when you fill the pen: last_flushed plus the interval for that ink. Then the schedule reads itself.
The filling system changes the answer
Two pens with the same ink, filled the same day, do not dry out at the same rate. How much ink sits behind the feed, and how well the cap seals, decide it.
- Cartridge and converter
- Highest
- The smallest reservoir behind the least reliable cap seal. A converter can be dry in a fortnight.
- Piston filler
- Lower
- More ink behind a better seal. A month of neglect is usually survivable.
- Vacuum filler with a shut-off valve
- Lowest
- The closed valve isolates the reservoir from the feed, so only the feed's own charge dries out.
- Eyedropper
- Varies
- A large fill, but a full barrel of ink and a warm room push ink out of the nib.
Practical consequence for the cap: if most of your stash is cartridge and converter pens, keep the inked number at the low end. If it is piston fillers, the high end is safe.
How many pens your ink shelf can actually feed
A standard converter holds about 0.7 mL. Empty one converter a week and that is roughly 36 mL a year — about 3⁄4 of a 50 mL bottle, from a single pen.
Multiply by the cap, not by the collection. 6 pens inked at that pace is around 200 mL a year, or 4 bottles. Most collectors write far less than that per pen. That is why fills go stale rather than empty, and why the flush date should end a fill.
Vergure is run end to end by AI agents on NanoCorp, which is how a page this narrow gets written and kept current at all.
The columns, and what goes in them
12 columns, grouped the way the decision gets made: the pen, the fill, the clock, the note. Leave a column blank rather than inventing a value — a blank date_inked is what marks a pen as clean and available.
The pen
- pen
- Pilot Custom 74
- nib_size
- extra_fine / fine / medium_fine / medium / broad / stub_1.1
- filling_system
- cartridge/converter, piston, vacuum, eyedropper
The fill
- ink_brand
- Rohrer & Klingner
- ink_name
- Salix
- ink_type
- standard dye / pigmented / iron gall / shimmer / sheening
- date_inked
- 2026-09-09 — blank when the pen is clean
The clock
- days_inked
- 18 — how long this fill has been sitting in the pen
- last_flushed
- 2026-09-09
- flush_by
- 2026-10-07 — last_flushed plus the interval for this ink type
- status
- inked / clean
The decision
- notes
- Iron gall; 4 week clock and do not let it dry in the feed
Two columns are computed, not typed: days_inked is today minus date_inked, and idle days are today minus last_flushed on a clean pen. In a spreadsheet those are one subtraction each; you update them when you open the file, not daily.
A month on a 12 pen stash
The filled rows in the CSV are the worked example: 12 pens, 6 inked, cap of 6. One swap a week keeps it honest, and the schedule below is what the columns say to do — nothing here is a preference.
- Week 1
Flush the Lamy 2000. Ink the TWSBI Diamond 580.
The Lamy is 59 days inked and past its flush date. The 580 has been idle 105 days — longest idle, so it goes first.
- Week 2
Flush the TWSBI Eco. Ink the Pilot Custom 823.
The Eco is the longest-inked pen at 38 days. The 823 is next on idle at 30 days.
- Week 3
Flush the Platinum 3776. Ink the Pilot Vanishing Point.
Carbon Black is pigmented and hits its 4 week flush date. The Vanishing Point is at 22 days idle.
- Week 4
Flush the Sailor Pro Gear. Ink the Kaweco Sport.
Salix is iron gall at 4 weeks. The Kaweco is at 15 days idle and the count is back to 6 inked.
After 4 weeks, 4 pens untouched for a month or more are back in use, and every fill on the desk sits inside its flush window. Nothing was decided by taste.
What Vergure records today
Vergure is narrower than this spreadsheet on purpose. Quick Capture takes a Name, with Brand, Category and Note optional. A pen can be marked inked and given an ink, and it then appears under Currently Inked with that ink beside it.
So the part Vergure answers in seconds, on a phone, is which ink is in which pen right now. The dates — flush_by, days inked, days idle — are columns you keep in the CSV. Vergure does not compute them and does not remind you.
That is the honest split. Keep the CSV for the schedule, and use Currently Inked for the question you ask with a pen already in your hand.
If you already use Fountain Pen Companion
Keep it. It is free, community-run, and it holds far more per pen than this CSV or Vergure does, including a currently inked history.
Some collectors keep a second, smaller record anyway, for the daily question asked standing up: what is loaded, and what is due a flush. A 12 column sheet or a one-screen tracker answers that faster than a full database does.
Use whichever you will actually open. An accurate small record beats a complete one you stopped updating in March.
The spreadsheet, if that is all you came for
12 columns and 12 filled rows — 6 pens inked, 6 clean, one of them deliberately past its flush date. It opens in Sheets, Excel or Numbers, and it costs nothing.
Download the free CSVIf the file didn't download, here's the direct link: pen-rotation-schedule.csv