I Won The Exploding Pen In The Dryer Lottery. (But I Found A Great Solution)

So my wife washed one of my jackets as well as a set of work pants and my sones jacket. I swear I went through all the pockets. Not just check them while holding the coat but actually putting the garments on and going through everything.  
 

Well pulling them out of the dryer we were greeted with this.

There is some of the cleaner I discovered sprayed on this but you get the idea  I have never seen a pen let go this bad.  The close were surprisingly not to bad.  Being casual work/weekend stuff they were perfectly fine.  
 

Anyway the contestants are.  

Complete failures include Gojo, Dawn, Isopropal Alcohol, Clorox cleanup and just strait bleach.  
 

Things that actually saw some transfer of ink to the rag were WD40, Sea-foam and bug and tar remover but we would be working on it for weeks at the rate it was dissolving the ink.

That left the two good off products.  The solvent based one in the small can works well but the fumes are REALLY bad.  To the point you could seriously hurt your self if you put your head in the dryer cleaning the back part of the drum.  So I went to homedepot and purchased a gallon of it and a mask rated for solvent and vapors and I was ready to get in to this with windows open and fans cranking.   But next to it was the other goof-off product and a quick read of label said it removed ink.   It was covered in that sticky dust that gets on things that have been on a retailers shelf for a really long time.  I cracked open the bottle and to my surprise virtually no small.   
 

The stuff works like a solvent but it feels like a soap.  I am wondering what it is but it is by far the best stuff I have ever found for cleaning this kind of mess  yes I have had this happen before but not to this extent.   
 

This stuff is a game changer for cleaning ink.  I am now wondering what it will do on other things.

I will post up an after photo in a bit.  The second photo is just after spraying it on the ink.  

Edit:  About an hour later.

The final result

One more note: I used a green scotch pad to accelerate the cleaning but it it was not hard scrubbing more like agitation.  
 

The two rages are soaked in hot water with some bleach that I am now running a cycle on high for a final cleaning.  

Thanks for the product review! Always good to see solutions (hah!) To problems like this..

How much rubbing did you need to do , 

I have some coroplast signs with magic marker on them and nothing seemed to get them clean,

Thanks for doing the legwork and report :)

That is one win I regret.  I just lost some work clothes to a pen.

This is why I use pencils.

californiamilleghia said:

How much rubbing did you need to do , 

I have some coroplast signs with magic marker on them and nothing seemed to get them clean,

Thanks for doing the legwork and report :)

I used a scotch pad but it was more for agitation. Not really hard scrubbing. 

Next time soak the rag in (non-flamable) solvent, toss it in the dryer and hit "Start".  

Seriously - great outcome to what might otherwise become the story of how Dean came to buy a new dryer... told over and over for the remainder of your long marriage.

I've been pleasantly surprised at the stuff that mother's carnuba cleaner wax will remove.

For other testing some day, I had a bunch of ppl recommend Dollar General's "Awesome" cleaner for getting tar off my hands. Worked well enough. Cheap, "natural" -- well, more natural than the brake cleaner I was about to use 

Looking at those pictures, I feel lucky that I've gotten off easy the couple times I've left a pen in my clothes and go thru the wash.

Goof-off sure smells like turpentine to me. 

That's an impressive explosion, and cleanup. 

If you need to carry a pen all the time, the answer is, Fisher Space Pen. They have pressurized cartridges that don't leak. The classic "bullet" style fits in your front pocket. I've had the same one for ~20 years (they're brass).

You can also get standard "clicker" types. 

The https://www.spacepen.com site has lots of versions that cost more than I want to spend (I like plain, cheap), but the fancier finishes and designs might appeal to you. 

You can get the basic bullet and clicker versions a bit less expensively from https://www.riteintherain.com, a company that sells waterproof paper for workers who are out in the elements. The pens they sell are Space Pens. They used to sell a plastic clicker version and may still, but I'd skip it, as the clicker mechanism fails. 

Top tip: If you get a bullet style, spring for the shirt pocket clip, without which the pen will invariably roll off a table and disappear. 

Top trivia: That chrome pen in every Project Farm video is a Space Pen. 

Top trick: Amaze and impress your SO by doing crosswords while lying in bed, pen pointing up. 

Top OCD tip: Different ink colors and ball sizes are available at the Space Pen site, if you don't want the black ink, medium ball that comes with the pen. 

Keith Tanner said:

Goof-off sure smells like turpentine to me. 

The solvent based stuff is like turpentine, MEK, PCE and Acetone mixed together.  The stuff in the spray bottle that I ended up using was very low smell. .  
 

The really weird part is we never found the pen. I am betting it was the Sock Gnomes pen.  At least that is the story I am sticking with.  

In reply to dean1484 :

It's lurking inside a pants leg or dress hem awaiting the opportunity to wreak havoc again. 

I had luck using a Mr. clean Magic eraser - or the generic version - when I had this issue in college. I seem to remember that Busch Light or maybe Hamms was involved too, but I don't think I used it directly on the marks.