...canola is just rapeseed oil. which means FireClean is wallet-rapeseed oil.
Wrong. Even if the makers of Fireclean did nothing more than re-bottle canola oil, they had legions of devoted fans. Their fans embraced them because their product was found to perform to the level of its advertisement. By all accounts that I have read, Fireclean is (still) a damned fine lubricant.
These same fans are now all butt hurt that they spent healthy amounts of money on a top-grade lubricant that could have been bought at the supermarket. They should not be. If the makers of Fireclean figured out that plain ol' canola oil works so amazingly well in guns, they deserve every bit of money that they made by bringing the idea to market. Every shooter who uses Fireclean, does so because they found it to be a step up from whatever they were using before, (or they are just buying it because someone else says that it is awesome, in which case they
deserve to be screwed hard) so what is the problem? That you paid a markup for someone else's thinking outside the box? Get over it! Fact is, if the guy that figured out that canola oil worked this way had made his findings public, he would have been laughed at by 'serious shooters.' Few would have taken him seriously. Instead, he marked it up and gave it a good advertising campaign. People bought it. (literally and figuratively) Like I said, the man deserves his money.
Now, I don't use Fireclean, and I used to roll my eyes at its fan boys. I use Slipstream. The same logic applies to it. The 'nano particles' used in Slipstream are not magic, and they are not Valkyrie Dust™. The stuff is not anything that you could not buy yourself and mix up... yet Joe and Crusader had the brains to see it and the balls to do it. I respect that. Joe deserves the money he makes, whether it be a lot or a little, because he offers a product of real value to the market. He deserves my money.
I could send a bottle of Slipstream off to be tested, then go on TFB with the chemical analysis and tell how it is nothing out of the ordinary... And I would be a jackass. The stuff works, so who freaking cares what it is. Anyone can say how easy it was to do - once they have been shown how.
Kaso