So you are saying lighter fluid is purer and less toxic than any other solvent available and yet the only place I have ever seen it spec-ed is for triggers?
This has fudd-sewing-circle written all over it.
If I spill this stuff on my hands my I can smell it for the rest of the day.
The only thing that possibly makes sense to me here is that it actually leaves a small non dirt collecting lubricant behind. If this were the case it would make perfect sense.
It’s a mild solvent of greases and oils, doesn’t absorb much water vapor, is less toxic, and is volatile. That’s not to say it doesn’t soak into things like cloth and skin and take hours to dry out, but metals are different in that they don’t have pores or Van der Waals interactions, both of which keep nonpolar solvents around very effectively. I’m also not saying it’s purer, but it *is* regulated to burn cleanly, which means that additives are controlled to some extent.
Sure, if you want the absolute best thing to wash a trigger with, remove the trigger and shake it in a jar of five-nines-pure butane. But you’re not losing a bunch by cutting costs a couple orders of magnitude.
In most cases where you’re flushing a mechanical widget, you’re going to be chasing it with oil or re-packing with grease, and making accommodations for preventing dirt ingress. Residue matters less. At industrial scales you want to use as little as possible, which means strong solvent. You also have fume hoods, often with activated charcoal, so toxicity matters less. Sometimes there are specific chemicals you’re required to use, like MEK in aerospace.
Other applications want the surface to wipe cleanly, with no residue, but you leave a liquid film thin enough that it evaporates almost instantly. You might do a 2-parter, and use acetone to dissolve the stuff and IPA to remove the acetone residue - but that only works if you can scrub the acetones surfaces, so it only works on flat-ish metal sheets.
Lacquer thinner is intended to thin lacquer. It doesn’t need to be volatile, it needs to be a strong solvent that thins nonpolar substances. Residue doesn’t matter because it’ll be overwhelmed by the lacquer.
Brake cleaner needs to dissolve polar and nonpolar deposits, quickly, with a minimum amount of fluid. It also needs to leave zero residue that could impact the brake fluid, or sealing, in any way, and disappear from nooks and crannies almost instantly. You pay for that with toxicity.
Triggers don’t want lubricants. They want hard, smooth, and clean surfaces. They certainly don’t want a soft coating that dust can embed into, or any friction modifiers. They have lots of nooks and crannies. You don’t want to remove any coatings or platings.
So yes, the chemicals generically packaged as lighter fluid are the inexpensive choice that does what they need to do without going for overkill in areas that don’t matter and aren’t beneficial.
