THIS WEEK IN GUN CULTURE: CRISCOGATE

Well, the panic over FIREClean is starting to die down but I’m guessing that on some level this is going to dog the manufacturers forever now.  If you haven’t heard, a fairly well-known blogger had a small amount of testing done on a flavour of the month gun lube and came to the conclusion that it’s almost canola.

Interestingly, the same blogger pointed out that it worked quite well, but the damage was done.  Videos refuting (and supporting) the claims were released, and analyzed to death, and argued about, and overall it was a pretty fun few days.

Of course we still don’t know what is added to FIREClean that makes it significantly better than plain canola; the owners of the company do have a patent on mixed vegetable oils for use as lubricant so it’s clearly not JUST canola.  But in a sense none of this should have been a big surprise: it’s organic, it’s non-toxic, and it doesn’t smell like girls in bikinis so it’s not coconut oil.  Options are starting to get limited for the base…

At any rate, here’s my take: if it works, it works, and I do keep hearing from guys who professionally run suppressed, full-auto ARs that it does work in their guns.  The issue I foresee with vegetable oils is oxidization and that sounds like what some people have seen on FIREClean-lubed guns: if you leave them for a few months, they may gum up.

If you’re using them all the time, it’s probably fine.  Maybe better than fine; it looks like it does pretty well on keeping carbon in suspension, and vegetable oils are still oils, so the gun’s lubed and it’ll probably tick away happily.  It wipes guns clean as well as anything I can remember, anyway.  I don’t think the performance is really in question.

That brings us to the cost issue: some people are very upset that Canola costs a couple of bucks a litre and FIREClean costs fifteen bucks an ounce, and they probably figure the owners are getting rich on it.

I’m sure they’re making money, although chances are the additives, whatever they are, cost something, and the packaging definitely costs something, and the distribution costs something, and the promotion costs something, and in the end the actual content is probably only 20% of the overhead.

So they probably aren’t buying canola by the truckload, marking it up a thousand percent, and selling it back to the truck driver while laughing in their sleeves.  They’re likely making a good living from it, but that doesn’t bother me.

What I don’t personally support is buying weird gun lubes when grease and oil are dirt cheap.  I use synthetic motor oil which, admittedly, has a bunch of additives that are designed to keep combustion-byproduct-water-compounds in suspension, and I don’t need that.  But a litre of it lasts forever and it works about as well as any gun lube ever will.

If I’m feeling fancy, I’ve also got a bit of love for air tool oil, which happens to have some pretty appealing properties for a gun lube as well.

Depending on the application, I also use high pressure grease, which is just oil mixed with a soap to make it sticky.  Again, a tube of fancy synthetic stuff costs about as much as the parking meter you have to plug if the Canadian Tire lot is full, and it will last nearly the rest of your life.

And these lubricants aren’t made by some guy who thinks he stumbled across a good combination of materials that should work well in a gun.

No, these are lubricants made by companies with dozens or hundreds of specialist chemical engineers and tribologists whose sole job is to research topics like “boundary lubrication in salt mine drilling equipment”.  Think about that application for a moment.

So if you think a couple of enthusiasts in a workshop somewhere are going to hit on a super lubricant that the company who makes the oil that protects the bearings in salt mine drills hasn’t already considered, I think you have a remarkable amount of faith in enthusiasts.

Personally I’m not much in the habit of telling people how to spend their money, nor am I remotely opposed to anybody making money off the lubrication of guns.  Honestly, so many guns are under-lubed that I’d rather see guns getting hosed with bad lube, than under-served with great stuff.

But as far as I’m concerned, even the way the West Texas Crude market is going these days, this is one area in which the smart money is still on big oil.