Trailer Bolt Replacement

[Fritz]

And in my monosyllabic ways

"No"

No no no!

 

[Corey_lax]

This thread is like a braid vs steel downrigger cable debate. Put some zinc bolts in and they will rust but might be strong enough. Put some stainless bolts in and maybe they will snap off right away. Or maybe they will be fine. Or maybe they aren’t even stainless at all. Blah blah blah. Nobody has the correct answer but your zinc bolts are going to rust so if you want to replace them as part of your regular maintenance, then have at er.

 

[jim morrow]

I sailed on my brothers sailboat a few times. He had discussions with other sailors re SS vs galvanized. conclusion was that you can't see ahead of time that the SS fastener is going to fail, but with the galvanized you can see the stress and soon to fail fastener, re and re it under nice conditions vs being under sail and have failures.

 

[jim morrow]

Perhaps the idea of using aluminum on a trailer is a presumptuous, or pretentious one.

 

[gunnerlove]

All things being equal and shear force being shear force…I have a couple observations after a lifetime of boating.

1) No aluminum boat manufacturer is hanging their outboards using galvanized fasteners.
2) ditto for pod builders.

And that’s a lot of shear force when a couple high horsepower O/Bs and a kicker are hanging off a 200lb pod bolted to a transo

I think Mercury did some math and engineering stuff and only then published instructions to use large enough bolts to take the anticipated loads. Everybody else just copied them or follows their instructions. As for pod "manufactures" best case is that they had their wives boyfriends model the anticipated loads in Solidworks before using what they had on hand.

Always replace what you remove with the same (or better) and not with a random stainless bolt with 25% of the originals yield strength.