Mertbl said:
Also is there any concern with corrosion and a water proofing agent on the hardware also?
Well the short answer is one can still get 'crevice corrosion' on any SS bolt once trapped off from the oxygen, which by looking at the picture attached of a 3-year old SS bolt into a frp glass boat, will occur on SS hardware. It, and other corrosion effects, i.e., galvanic corrosion due to dissimilar metals, is only exacerbated and accelerated in the presence of saltwater as the salinity in that water type makes it an ideal electrolyte, i.e., it carries more electric potential.
With all that said, at least coating your SS bolts in a good marine grease or gasket solvent helps prevent such corrosion from happening. The US Navy, and probably even the US Coast Guard, even helped bring the TefGel product to market, for SS hardware attached to its fleet of aluminum hull vessels, that has been proven to eliminate galvanic corrosion between stainless steels and aluminum.
I admittedly go overkill with my SS hardware used on tin boats, but I only like to do things once - haha! Plus I boat in the salt. So I make use of greased hardware, adhesive-lined heatshrink on the body, with nylon washers under the heads of the bolts and under the washers ... but I previously
had used good ol' duct tape to the same effect/results for many years! On here somewhere there is even a picture of duct-taped SS hardware and tin that I removed many years later and it was still sound, with zero corrosive damage.
But honestly, I bet most freshwater boaters don't even take the basic steps and some maybe never have an issue, or most likely never acknowledge what it was that really caused it.
