Water displacement formula, 40th attempt

Back when I was in full time NS, the clean­ing of weapons was a mun­dane, time-consuming, daily chore. Between the 7 troop­ers in a com­bat sec­tion, we’d have around seven small arms (M16S1), cou­ple of grenade launch­ers (M203), cou­ple of light auto­mat­ics (Ultimax100), two GPMGs, and a heavy machine gun (Brown­ing .5 HMG).

Car­bon residue would get stuck in the crevices and bar­rels of the weapons, which is the real rea­son why we were really really reluc­tant to fire our weapons dur­ing train­ing. Of course, this was mar­keted as ‘ammu­ni­tion con­ser­va­tion discipline’.

Every day when we were in camp, we’d be clean­ing our weapons. When we were in the field, we’d clean our weapons. Noth­ing to do? Clean weapons. If there were to be a war, it’d have to have been put on hold because we were clean­ing our weapons.

One of the hard­est, and some­how most sat­is­fy­ing part of clean­ing a weapon was the bar­rel pull through. This entailed putting a folded piece of flan­nelette (var­i­ously mis­pro­nounced as flannel-lite, fan­nelite and fan­talite) in the eye of the pull through rod, and pulling the rod through the bar­rel of the weapon.

The thicker the flan­nelette, the more car­bon residue it extracted. But the thicker the folded piece of flan­nelette, the harder it was to pull the entire thing through. Some­times, you had to recruit your buddy to help hold your weapon while you pulled the rod through.

Four or five pulls, then another one with a new piece of flan­nelette usu­ally did the trick, but not with­out a con­sid­er­able amount of elbow grease.

Then one day, a pla­toon mate came to camp with a can of WD-40. He said it would work won­ders with the weapons clean­ing. Of course, we tried it. It worked. It cut down clean­ing time by about 10 mil­lion years. We were free.

Queues at the can­teen and pay­phones became longer. We spent more time and money on snacks, cig­a­rettes and con­tact with the out­side world. It was obvi­ous that the frag­ile fab­ric of sol­dierly cohe­sion and sol­i­dar­ity was being threatened.

They banned the use of WD-40 in weapons clean­ing. They then spread such dis­in­for­ma­tion as “WD-40 will cause bar­rel explo­sions and blow your pretty face off when you fire the weapon. Your buddy stand­ing nearby will get it too”. Of course, that didn’t work, because one or two fool­hardy troop­ers went ahead to try it, risk­ing life, limb and the pretty face of their buddy stand­ing nearby, fir­ing their weapons unin­hib­it­edly, know­ing that they’d either die or have a lot of free time on their hands because they never had to spend so much time clean­ing any more.

I had my car radio tuned to the BBC World Ser­vice yes­ter­day morn­ing, and lis­tened to the most inter­est­ing story about WD-40, and how it evolved from a rocket scientist’s solu­tion against mis­sile cor­ro­sion, into one of the world’s most ubiq­ui­tous brands, but at the same time remain­ing unchanged as a prod­uct that always deliv­ered beyond expectations.

I did not know that 20 years ago. Now I do.