FireClean for your AR, Gun Oil, and the Canadian connection

Melnibonean said:
Good point



Then how does "seasoning" happen to a cast iron skillet?
And along those lines, I once watched a couple of welders up in the patch heat a steel girder up to "get the water out". And sure enough, steam started rising from that piece of steel and water started bubbling to the surface. How did that moisture penetrate the steel?

Not arguing; genuinely curious
Click to expand...

Cast iron is semi porous, it has so much carbon in it there is flakes of graphite in the material. That's a whole different story, I said metals used in firearms... You have a cast iron gun? Lol.

Heating up steel will remove water from the surface, not inside the material itself. Nothing bubbles out of the steel, just condensation evaporating.

I could try and get some high magnification pictures of steels... Clearly no room for anything to penetrate lol. That would make for an extremely weak material.
 
If oil soaked into steel, oil and gas would seep through the .040" steel used in automotive gas tanks and oil pans, and a 5 minute solvent wash would not get 20 year old always been soaked in oil parts clean enough for powder coating.
 
Melnibonean said:
Good point



Then how does "seasoning" happen to a cast iron skillet?
And along those lines, I once watched a couple of welders up in the patch heat a steel girder up to "get the water out". And sure enough, steam started rising from that piece of steel and water started bubbling to the surface. How did that moisture penetrate the steel?

Not arguing; genuinely curious
Click to expand...

Cast iron is metallurgically very different than anything used in guns, except Hi-points. The surface is really rough. It's easy to get oils to stick to it and if you use oils which will polymerize, you can build up a thick coating of that polymerized oil.

No gun will have a surface like that (except Hi-Points) so the oils will do a terrible job of adhering. Also, since the goal is lubricating, even if you could do that, you probably wouldn't want to.

When you heat a piece of steel with a torch, the moisture is actually a byproduct of the combustion. If you heated it by just placing it on a red hot anvil, you wouldn't see any water.

This is moderately easy to prove: if you heat up a bunch of steel and weigh it before and after, it'll be the same weight. If you could get it to absorb enough water that you could actually see water bubbling out of it, it'd be a lot heavier when "wet".

The closest gun steel will ever get to "pores" (other than Hi-Point) is the very tiny amount of peak-and-valley surface variation that even machined surfaces have. That's what boundary lubrication is for.

http://www.syntheticlubricants.ca/english/view.asp?x=966


But you are definitely remembering FL's claims correctly. They are part of the reason I have always had a dislike for that stuff. That is complete snake oil pseudoscience.

I say this once in a while so I can't remember if I've said it here recently or not, but in general, most guns we're familiar with are pretty forgiving when it comes to lube. You can get away with pretty poor formulations, and that's why FrogLube succeeded despite being mediocre at best.

You won't really see issues until you start seriously working some aspect of the lube, by doing something that tests that aspect. That could be oxidization, say: you leave the gun for a few months and see what shape the lube is in. FrogPaste and FireCanola do poorly on this. You could test it by subjecting it to high heat; FL isn't great here and I can't imagine Fireclean would be ideal although some people seem to do well with it in suppressed ARs so maybe the low heat resistance of Canola doesn't tell the whole story. You could test the initial lubricity and the corrosion resistance, and on that FL does pretty well. Whether that's well-suited to your applications, given the drawbacks of that product, is something only an individual can really answer.

Personally I just can't get into spending money on inferior stuff when motor oil and axle grease is objectively better in almost every regard, and about a tenth the price. Or in some cases less.

And I don't have to #### around trying to remove every trace of something else, and then specially warm my guns, and then wipe things off, and chant verses in sumerian, and whatever. I just slap in grease or pour oil on, and shoot.


Granted, oil and grease aren't as utterly non-toxic as canola etc.

Of course, non-toxic substances saturated with lead and barium compounds from primers and gunpowder are not what I'd call "healthy".
 
I picked up a sonic cleaner. For keeping my hands less toxic with various oils this seems to mitigate a portion of my cleaning. So I don't mind going back to Break free and Slip 2000 or Hopes9.


My only question is has LAV stock dropped of with this whole debacle. Fireclean may work but if the production is anything like Canola oil cost then it is ridiculously over priced.
 
I had the pleasure of a long career in purchasing for Canada's largest railway. Over the years I purchased just about any product you could think of including many steel products such as railway wheels, axles and rail. CN had possibly one of the best and most advanced technical research facility in the industry with a sizable team of professionals including metallurgists. I guess it's obvious that railways use a lot of steel products in many critical applications. What isn't as obvious is the complexity of many of these products and the significant danger when and if they fail in service. One of my early responsibilities included ordering the cast and forged steel wheels used for railway cars and locomotives. Wheels are absolutely critical in the safe operation of railways. In the mid to late 60's, a particular type of cast steel wheels failed much more frequently than acceptable so investigating these failures required me to learn quite a bit about metals and how and why they failed. This also allowed me to spend some of time at the research facility where I worked with the professionals or perhaps I should say they taught me a very rudimentary understanding of metallurgy. I was able to see first hand how failures were investigated by various means but including examination under very high magnification. as stated by earlier posters, steel does not absorb oils and greases because it is very dense. It's very interesting to see steels under very high magnification because, depending on the metallurgy and treatment including heat and controlled cooling, steel is quite granular and looks a bit like a pudding made up of various granular shapes with fillers between the particles. Nevertheless, the claims that certain oils and lubricants actually penetrate the steel are untrue. Curing items like cast iron skillets is actually accomplished by creating a coating through the use of oils and high heat. That's why a good pan is never scoured as the coating would be disturbed or removed and the non-stick quality of the cured utensil would be lost. While the grain of some steels is finer and denser than others, none of them is actually porous and capable of absorbing a lubricant.
 
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