[Published on Outside's blog]

Intro / Holes / Wind / Jank / Metal

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{Intro – 4/1/09}

My sailboat and I are both 31 years old, and the disparity between the amount of maintenance we require is staggering. I require pasta, beer, a toothbrush, an hour or two of exercise each day, and six hours of sleep each night. The sailboat requires scrubbing, tuning, cleaning, tending, repairing, and monitoring the workings of a diesel engine, a self-contained electrical system, a few thousand feet of rigging, a few dozen gears and pulleys and cams, and the comforts of a regular house, kitchen and bathroom included — all of which is crammed into a tiny space, and sitting in saltwater, slowly corroding, rotting, rusting, mildewing, melting, rubbing, or leaking away — which is to say: it requires constant, round-the-clock attention, like some sort of overgrown baby with technical needs; a giant baby robot, maybe.

During my first week on my boat, I didn’t shave, shower, or straighten my hair. I washed my dishes with my fingers, pissed in a bucket, drank wine out of the bottle, and slept sound as a baby. My pants told the story of my existence; in them were bits of caulk, epoxy, and grease; stains of sweat, salt, snot, and blood; smudges of pasta sauce, wine, and melted chocolate; metal filings, fiberglass strands, resin shards, and saw dust. And I haven’t even started sailing yet. That’s still 9 months away.

I’m preparing to sail around the world. Two dirtbag friends (Matt and Jon) and I hatched the idea a few years ago, inspired partly, I’ll admit, by Joshua Slocum’s classic adventure story, “Sailing alone around the world,” which he wrote more than a hundred years ago. It resonated. That, and we were looking to up the adventure ante, so to speak. We wanted a bigger, more committing challenge, while we still had the chance. So we saved up. We crewed on other people’s boats. We compared boats for sale. And then, at the end of 2007, we boogied down to Mexico and bought a 40-foot boat for $60,000. It was, and still is, overwhelming.

We didn’t grow up sailing. (I spent a couple of weeks at a YMCA sailing camp when I was 12, dinking around on a tiny 14-foot Sunfish in the Potomac river.) None of our parents could tell a binnacle from a spinnaker, and until a couple of years ago, neither could any of us. But we’ve adventured in every other way, and developed strong technical climbing, mountaineering, and canyoneering skills. We’re hoping that the time we’ve spent tied to opposite ends of a rope, pushing ourselves physically, in uncomfortable conditions, out in the middle of nowhere, will prove relevant. We’re banking on it, actually.

Our sailboat is named Syyzgy (Greek for “the alignment of stars”), and she’s a Valiant 40, a sturdy, ocean-going vessel that’s sort of the Land Rover of boats. Of course, inside her thick fiberglass hull, she had her share of janky hoses, scary wiring, corroded fasteners, chipped plastic, fatigued lines, scummed paint, mildewy corners, and broken parts. We’ve been fixing her up for almost a year now, doing all the work ourselves, learning as we go. Among other things, I’ve learned to repair fiberglass, such that I can drill a fist-sized hole in my boat and patch it and still sleep soundly onboard that boat. That seems like a victory to me.

I’ll be blogging about fixing up Syzygy here, and hope to reveal the nitty-gritty of self-reliant sailing rather than the dreamscape fantasies of luxury-class yachting: stories about settling into a new pursuit, dealing with setbacks (mechanical, personal, financial), and working steadily, realistically, toward pursuing a wild dream — everything that goes into planning an adventure of this magnitude.

-JW

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{200 Holes in the Deck and Counting – 4/8/09}

Our neighbor Greg walked over the other morning and asked what we were up to. Matt had strung up an extension cord on the deck, and had out two grinders, a drill, a hole saw, a shop-vac, a face mask, a respirator, a pencil, a ruler, an awl, and a hammer. Greg’s got a certain perspective on our goings-on, perhaps better than our own. His forty-foot barge, which he converted to a graphic-design studio, has huge windows, affording him a fine view of Syzygy and the mess about her deck. He must have known that something big was about to happen. (How he manages to work while we operate power tools all day is beyond me.)

“We’re adding four more windows,” I said.

“If you cut any more holes in your boat, there won’t be a boat left anymore,” he said.

It was funny because it was so true. In the last few months, Matt and I have drilled more than 200 holes in Syzygy’s deck, from tiny quarter-inch holes to a giant two-by-ten-foot rectangle. As we like to joke, cutting holes in our boat is what we do best.

I should explain: the deck is sandwich-like, in that it’s made of two layers of fiberglass with a layer of balsa wood in between. This design has its ups and downs. One down is that if you apply a lot of force, it’s not too hard to squish the sandwich, which weakens it. Another down is that if you drill through the sandwich and don’t seal the hole just right, water that leaks in ends up rotting the balsa wood (further reducing the deck’s strength) before it leaks all the way into the boat. (It’s strange, but if you have a leak, you want it to actually leak.) And the biggest down: after 31 years, most of the holes in Syzygy’s deck aren’t sealed just right anymore. You can tell by the little rust circles around every screw.

So the proper, by-the-book way to drill a hole through our deck is to drill a much bigger hole than you need, and then use a router bit to scoop out some of the balsa wood around the hole. Then you put a piece of tape on the bottom of the hole, and pour in a big glob of thickened epoxy, which is about as thick as peanut butter and about as strong as, well, modern plastics. Then, once the epoxy hardens, you drill a hole through the middle of it. This accomplishes two things: it provides some support for the deck (like the little plastic thingy that keeps the pizza box from collapsing all over the top of the pizza), and it protects the soft, wooden core of the deck from rotting if water leaks through the hole.

There’s no shortage of things screwed through the deck: a dozen stanchions (A.K.A. fence-posts around the edge); a five-inch chimney flu; hardware for flying the spinnaker; the life raft cradle; the dingy cradle; the fairleads (pulleys) that keep our lines in order; our new rope clutches; nine chainplates that keep the rigging tight; and two 10-foot tracks that the jib cars slide along. As you probably guessed, not one of these was things was installed by-the-book. Boat builders just don’t do that. As you probably also guessed, we’re changing that. It’s just one of many modifications we’re doing to beef up Syzygy for a circumnavigation.

That morning, Matt was starting a project that he’d been scheming up for a while: letting more light into Syzygy’s cabin. (Medium-sized holes, this time.) Jon was all for it; I’d spent months objecting on aesthetic grounds. I thought Syzygy would lose her classic look with additional windows, as a brick colonial would with asymmetric modern flourishes. I argued that, if anything, we should paint the interior white, to brighten up the dark, wooden cabin, as another Valiant owner has done. Finally, I consented. Why? Because I know Matt has higher standards than me in almost all regards, and figured he’d fix up whatever mess he made. Be my guest, I thought.

By the time Matt actually began cutting into Syzygy’s deck, I’d started cutting a different hole, just forward of the cockpit. I was cutting out an index-card-sized chunk of plywood beside the companionway (A.K.A. door), so that I could install a metal backing plate under a new rope clutch for two of the lines that run to the spinnaker. I had foam earplugs in, because the oscillating saw is loud in small spaces. Halfway though, Matt, up on deck, started using the variable-speed grinder, which is easily the most dangerous tool we regularly use, on account of its size and also because Matt removed the guard. The next 20 seconds were dramatic. Because I was squatted halfway inside and halfway outside the boat, I heard the roar of the grinder all around me. It was disconcerting – partly because I thought I had been making a racket, and Matt’s racket was even louder, but more so because Matt seemed to be destroying even more of the boat than I was.

Moments later, Matt, with a look of grave concern, put down the grinder, ran past me, opened up the port cockpit locker, grabbed a fire extinguisher, and ran back to where he’d been. Thin wisps of smoke were seeping out of the slice he’d cut through the boat — and he was worried that the balsa wood core was on fire. So goes using the grinder: it’s such a powerful tool that it’s easy to cause severe unexpected damage. A few days later, I’d have my own grinder-related accident.

Matt poured a glass of water on the seam and declared the situation resolved. The wood hadn’t been burning so much as smoldering, and there wasn’t much he could do to prevent that. I suspect that Matt’s reaction was essentially instinctive. Ripping a hole through a perfectly good boat already went against every nerve in his body; and ignoring signs of a fire went against thousands of years of evolution. It would have been impossible not to respond.

An hour later, Matt had cut a 6″ x 16″ hole — a rectangle with rounded corners — out of the side of the cabin top, and, unfinished as it was, it looked promising. From inside the boat, the difference was immediately apparent. Light streamed into the cabin, illuminating the large forward bulkhead. Outside, Matt traced the position of the windowpane (a 1/2″-thick piece of tinted acrylic) on the cabin top, and then held it in place. I realized I’d erred in being so cautious. The new window was, in sailing lingo, Bristol, as in “ship shape and Bristol fashion,” a classic Britishism for what in America we’d simply call “spiffy” or “sharp.” We were so encouraged by the window that we spent every minute of the next few days cutting out three more holes and installing three more.

Greg had mentioned that a big weather system was headed our way, but we chose to ignore the information. On Monday we cut the holes and cored the edges. On Tuesday, as the barometer began falling, we filled the edges with epoxy and sanded them smooth and square. I got a bit antsy, and resorted to what Matt called “strong-arm tactics” to remove some stubborn pieces of plywood. I didn’t want any hangups — standard operating procedure for boat work — to delay us.

By Wednesday the project became a race against the clock. Rain was forecast that evening, and rain + three large holes in the deck = not Bristol. That morning, as I painted the first coat of white paint on the edges, light clouds appeared on the western horizon. By 11am, after the third coat of paint had dried and the holes had been taped up (for applying silicon), wispy clouds were flying by. By 1pm, Matt and I had fastened the first window. Getting 18 washers, lock washers, and nuts on 18 nearly inaccessible bolts had required surgical precision with needle-nose pliers, and demanded patience. By 2pm, when a cold front swept through, we almost had the second window done. At 3pm, low, grey, mammatus clouds appeared, and the skies appeared ready to open up. We finished installing the 3rd window at 3:36pm — enthralled that we’d eked out a win. Matt figured the rain would arrive within two hours. I thought maybe three.

We opened up a bottle of Chimay to celebrate, then turned on some reggae, and spent the rest of the afternoon tinkering with small projects inside the boat until the alcohol rendered further progress impossible.

I awoke to hard rain, and spent a few fuzzy minutes observing the water on the hatch three feet over my head. Ovoid droplets collected into small puddles and then slid off, always along the same invisible route. Adjusting my focus, I saw the mast and spreaders pointing up, crucifix-like, into a gray sky.

I got up, and first thing examined our new windows, to check for leaks. All were dry except one. On the aft, starboard window, a small puddle had formed on the bottom edge. I’ll be honest; what I thought was: oh crap. I examined the rest of the window, and discovered a drop hanging from the fiberglass six inches above the puddle. The new window was waterproof; it’s just that in the process of exposing more parts of the boat, I’d discovered another leak that had thus far gone undetected. And that’s how it goes: you just barely finish one project, and have barely enough time to revel in your achievement, when another announces itself. Typical.

–JW

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{San Francisco’s Wind – 4/15/09}

Let’s talk about wind a bit.

It can be anabolic or katabatic; barotropic or baroclinic; convergent or divergent; cyclonic or anticyclonic; veering or backing. One can measure its fetch, frontogenesis, and frontolysis, as well as its force on the Beaufort scale. On April 12, 1934, an anemometer on top of New Hampshire’s Mt. Washington measured it moving at 231 miles per hour — the highest ever recorded. We understand that a 15-knot wind blowing all day will create waves five feet high, and that a 40-knot wind blowing for two days will create waves 33-feet high. We refer to it in various forms with terms like squall, breeze, gust, typhoon, gale, monsoon, and zephyr — words that are of Scandinavian, Spanish, Norse, Cantonese, Old English, Arabic, and Greek origins, respectively. We’re even familiar with the name for the place where there is none: the doldrums.

If, upon contact, a wind freezes with your beard or hair, it’s called a Barber. Off of South Africa, it’s called the Doctor, or a Bull’s Eye. North of New Guinea, it’s called a Warm Braw, near Santa Barbara, it’s called a Sundowner, in Southern Australia, it’s called a Brickfielder or a Cock-eyed Bob, and in parts of Alaska, it’s called a Turnagain. In New England there are Nor’easters, in New Zealand there are Nor’westers, in Texas there are Northers, and when that last wind reaches Mexico, it becomes known as a Norte.

An Arabic wind, the Mezzar-ifoullousen, translates to “that which plucks the fowls,” while a Spanish wind, the Descuernacabras, translates to “the wind that dehorns goats.” Don’t mistake it for its more blustery brother, the Matacabras,. That one actually kills goats. The Chocolatero (a Mexican wind) is so named because it’s dusty brown, the Harmattan (Arabic) because it’s blood-red, and the Haizebeltza (Spanish) because it’s black. The Melteme (Greek) is “bad tempered,” the Simoom (Arabic) is “poison,” the Tebba (Turk) is “feverish.”

Most of the names of Mediterranean winds sound like Shakespeare characters or prescription drugs: Borasco, Etesian, Gregale, Levanter, Leveche, Maestro, Mistral, Tramontana, Vardarac, Sirocco, Austru, Datoo, Ghibli, Xlokk.

Half of the winds in North America are Native American: Chinook, Squamish, Taku, Knik, Matanuska, Pruga, Stikine, Shawondasee. The other half have Spanish names: Santa Ana, Diablo, Mono, Papagayo, Bayamo, Brisote, Chubasco, Coromell, Cordonazo. This is the New World, indeed.

As you head down the east coast of South America, you’ll encounter Abroholos (Brazil), Suestados (Uruguay), Kolawaiks (northern Argentina), Pamperos (Southern Argentina), and Williwaws (in the Strait of Magellan).

In Africa you might find Haboob, Harmattan, Leste, Shamal, and Sharki winds; and in the Pacific you’ll find Barat, Brubu, Churada, Kona, Pali, Sumatra, Hayate.

Here in San Francisco, where there’s a regular onshore wind and plenty of it, the wind is nameless. Diablos — offshore foehn winds, carrying warm, dry air down canyons (Northern California’s equivalent of Santa Anas) — will sometimes blow in from the east, but what of the strong western wind that gets funneled through the Golden Gate? I hereby submit the name Fogger.

Twenty-five knots is standard fare for a Fogger. In 1835, Foggers made tacking out of the Bay a three-day affair for Richard Henry Dana, aboard the 87-foot Pilgrim. (Old boats couldn’t sail nearly as close to the wind as today’s can). Foggers, combined with strong currents and heavy shipping traffic, make San Francisco the most challenging place to sail in the country. They also keep the Coast Guard busy. The Coast Guard’s San Francisco unit conducts more search-and-rescue missions than any other — almost 3,000 each year. Every time we’ve gone out sailing, we’ve heard this transmission, on channel 16 of the VHF radio, at least once: “This is Coast Guard Sector San Francisco. What is your location and the nature of your distress?”

There are scores of books on shipwrecks, their scopes ranging from a hemisphere to an ocean to a bay. There’s a at least one book on shipwrecks for every state with more than 20 miles of Atlantic or Pacific coastline, and more than a few books on the shipwrecks of Florida and the Great Lakes. There’s also one on Cape Cod, New York City, Boston, the Juan de Fuca strait, the Florida Keys, and the mouth of the Columbia river. The only shipwreck book in this country not yet written is on those of Kansas. But the book that covers the smallest geographic area, and the shortest history, is the book about shipwrecks right here, at the Golden Gate. The wind and the water teem here.

The San Francisco Bulletin, in 1868, described the dangers: “The greatest number of disasters converge upon a few points — Mile Rock, Arch Rock, Little Alcatraz, South Bight, Fort Point and point Reyes, seem to have been the most fatal places.” It continued, “Every vessel leaving the port must either beat out of the harbor or take a tug. A considerable number of accidents have occurred in later years in beating out. Vessels have been either caught in an eddy, or missed stays, or both mishaps have occurred at the same time.”

Last year, a winter storm brought gusts of 70 knots, prompting officials to temporarily ban trucks and buses from crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. That was unusual. A few months earlier, three friends who were just finishing a circumnavigation on board the 44-foot SohCahToa stopped by, en route to Seattle. The winds then were not unusual. They sailed in through the Gate, hung out for a few days, and sailed back out. They said that was the most wind they experienced on their whole trip. Right here.

Matt and I went out on Saturday with a few friends, and as usual, had way too much sail up. Syzygy’s rail was buried in the water, the whole boat heeled over 40 degrees. By the time we’d furled the jib, hoisted the staysail, and put a reef in the mainsail, my hat had blown away. That’s the Foggers. Let’s just say we’re getting some good practice.

-JW

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{On Jankiness – 4/22/09}

Over the last few months, Matt and Jon and I have taken great pride in removing most of the final janky parts from the boat. You could say that’s how we prioritized our refitting projects: by endeavoring to eliminate jankiness. Whenever we discovered a severely corroded wire or a screw that had rusted into a pile of dust or a cracked and pathetically brittle hose or a rotten piece of wood, we’d throw the offending part onto the cabin floor, and yell, “Jank removed!” It’s amazing how much shit was crammed into a 40-foot boat. We took immense pride in casting off such crap, and in bringing Syzygy up to 2009 standards. That was the first stage of boat repair, and we’re largely through with it, thank god, because my tolerance for jankiness has bottomed out.

I used to get giddy with envy when I met people just starting to work on their old boats, enthralled by the great big exciting project that lay ahead. I was jealous of Gary, a bearded guy my age who I met four months ago on the way back from the grocery store. He was the happy new owner of a 1972 Columbia 28, which he bought at auction for $1600. What a deal! As Gary started laying out his plans, I realized that he’d bought a huge bag of mysteries and problems. The same went for Loren, who bought a Catalina 27 for $3,000 over the summer. Fantastic, I had thought. Then Loren invited Matt and I sailing, and after a brief pre-sail inspection, we were concerned enough with his boat’s condition that we brought along a handheld VHF radio just in case it sunk beneath us.

Then there was Edwin, a hearty Irishman I met on the dock a few months ago. He had the deep, booming voice of an opera singer — a voice that echoed inside his lungs before escaping. He was the proud owner of what was easily the marina’s most dilapidated boat, which gave me a headache just to think about. It had huge bare patches on the hull, a vegetable garden growing on the rudder, a wall-o-barnacles on the dinghy, worn, gray sails, and seriously corroded rigging — and that’s just what was casually visible. Below deck it was a disaster zone. I tried to peek in, and saw stuff strewn everywhere. Edwin justified it by saying he was divorced, and entitled to make his own mess. He also said he’d invite me on board when he cleared it up a bit. (This never happened). When he referred to a transmission as a “tranny” and a two-cylinder engine as a “two-banger” he sounded like he knew what he was talking about, but when he claimed that within two months he’d have his jank-ridden boat fixed up and be sailing south to Mexico, his words became just words again. I’ll believe it when I see it (he and his boat are up at a boatyard in Berkeley), and in the meantime, I don’t care to think about it.

These days, gladly, we’re largely through with the jank-removal stage, and the few remaining janky bits are hearty stragglers indeed, hiding away in deep, unexplored recesses of our boat. A few weeks ago, I threw away the framed pastel watercolor painting of a sailboat that had been hung on the forward cabin bulkhead for so long that the wood beneath it was noticeably darker. Finally, I decreed that the time had come. As I threw the tacky artwork into the pile-o-jank, I almost declared it the “greatest piece of jank removed from Syzygy,” but caught myself, and rightfully so, because Matt and I just spent two days tearing out the craptastic 30-year-old insulation in the fridge, and what a laugh that was. Expecting a six-pack to stay cold in our fridge was like expecting a windbreaker to suffice in the Arctic. We filled up a few trash bags with the thin, cruddy foam and fiberglass, then swept up, and reveled briefly in our sailboat sanctuary, slowly coming along as it is, feeling the glory that shines only upon purists or perfectionists or masochists. You choose.

-JW

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{A Little Metallurgical History – 4/30/09}

A hundred years ago, right around the time Joshua Slocum disappeared at sea, much of the country was busy bickering about steel. Train tracks were breaking — cracking, fracturing, fissuring, etc. — and derailed trains, the hazard of the day, were a hot topic. “Amazing Increase in Broken Rails,” announced a typical headline in an April, 1907 story in the New York Times.

From 1902 to 1904, 1,450 derailments in the US killed 184 people. Track failure rates, and casualties, peaked in 1907, and five years later they weren’t much lower. For each year over most of the next decade, 500 derailments, and 50 deaths, was about average.

The steel industry said it wasn’t their fault, but rather, the railroads’. It said the railroads were using trains that were too heavy (carrying too much cargo, or too many passengers), and going too fast (employing engines too large, taking turns too hard), on badly-shaped wheels. It said the railroads were being stingy, not buying heavy-enough rails. Of course, rail was sold by weight.

The railroad companies, and most engineers, said it was much simpler. As Scientific American put it, the problem was a “ring of steelmakers who make bad rails.” More specifically, the problem was bad steel.

Early specifications had dictated the chemistry of railroad steel, but high-grade ore was becoming scarce and expensive. Phosphorous content crept from .08% up above .10%, to the dismay of many builders. Carbon content crept up, too — making the steel stronger, but more brittle. Some steel companies added vanadium, aluminum, or titanium. To save money, others rolled their rails at higher temperatures. And when threatened, steel makers refused to comply with older specs.

Typically, investigations — private and public — followed. Pennsylvania lines began collecting failure statistics by manufacturer. Harriman lines, which began its own analysis in 1907, found that newer, heavier rails had the highest failure rates. Investigating a wreck on the Central of Georgia line, the Interstate Commerce Commission declared the track “deplorable.” An engineer from the American Railway Engineering Association (AREA) described production methods and steel quality of utmost importance. All of this led the New York Times to editorialize, “the manufacturers squirt molten steel upon a railroad… take their pay at $28 a ton, and expect their careless product to serve its purpose.”

All of this is in Mark Aldrich’s thorough railroad history, “Death Rode the Rails,” which is fascinating if, like me, you care to dork out when you get the chance. And here’s how I got the chance: I was up in Berkeley, at Bowlin Equipment Co. this afternoon, buying some stainless steel bolts for the boat, when Larry, the owner, asked me if I wanted to see something “really cool.”

Bowlin is my single favorite place we regularly go to get supplies, and here’s why: there are three employees and only three employees, always; there’s a bowl of Tootsie Rolls and Jolly Ranchers on the counter, and a pot of coffee; and they still do business with hand-written invoices and an old-fashioned, carbon-copy, non-electronic credit-card machine. It’s the kind of place where people walk in, dump their obscure projects on the counter, and say, “I need one of these,” and go home happy. Larry and his crew are experts — more familiar with fasteners than you’d believe is possible — and they always have the parts in stock. No, they don’t sell rivets. Just fasteners.

The last time Larry told me about something really cool, it was a five-minute video about how nuts and bolts are manufactured, and I thought it was awesome. So my answer was obvious.

-”Well, yeah” I said at the same time as Matt. This is, by the way, the best thing about going to such shops: you actually learn stuff. Actually, it’s the best thing about fixing up an old boat: you learn more than you ever, ever, thought possible about the simplest things.

Larry produced a singe piece of paper, titled “Fastener Test Report.” It was a structural analysis of a 5/8″ hex bolt, full of the information that we’ve always wondered about. We have, after all, purchased at least a thousand nuts, bolts, screws, and washers in the course of fixing up Syzygy, and sometimes the purchases made sense, and sometimes they didn’t. What size bolt ought we buy? What pitch? What type of metal? What’s the difference anyway, and why, and how can you tell?

The Fastener Test Report was produced by Infasco, a manufacturer eager to demonstrate that it makes quality fasteners, all marked with a little equilateral triangle on the head. Hence the test results: four bolts, out of a batch of 9,800, were tested until they failed, revealing a tensile strength of between 167,000 and 170,000 psi (or 42,752 lbs), a surface hardness between 56.7 and 58.2, and a Rockwell core harness between 35.5 and 36.6. Furthermore, a heat chemical analysis revealed that the bolts contained .35% carbon, .67% manganese, .007% phosphorous, .019% sulfur, .22% silicon, and .86% chromium. Because the bolts had been tempered above 900 degrees, and oil quenched, and contained no visual discontinuities, they were deemed to comply in all respects with these specs: SAE J-429 (grade 8) and ASME B18.2.1.

All that, when a couple of numbers, courtesy of the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) would have sufficed. That and a library shelf of exceedingly intricate, expensive, unsexy reference volumes.

But that’s how I got back to the railroads and steel companies at the turn of the century: I started digging into the specs and industrial standards, and it was in that era that the standards organizations arose.

The American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) was formed in 1898 (while Slocum was off sailing the Spray) and the American Railway Engineering Association (AREA), which proposed industry-wide testing and quality-control standards for steel manufacturing, was formed in 1899. The National Board of Standards was formed in 1901 (the same year as British Standards) and was renamed the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 1903.

Why the huge impetus? Because in addition to the broken rails and derailments and deaths, electrical instruments couldn’t be calibrated, and because people measured a gallon eight different ways. Fire hydrants connected to fire hoses with more than 600 different couplings, rendering most fire departments unable to help others. Engineers building on the Washington Monument didn’t know what type of cable to use for the elevators, the Government Printing Office didn’t know what type of ink to use, and the military didn’t know what type of fuel to use in planes. The time had come.

Within a generation, derailments and related accidents dropped to a third of what they had been. And more importantly for me and my boat, thanks to such standards organizations, a whole bunch of specs on the various grades of stainless steel have been codified, making the metal magic slightly less mysterious

Stainless steel is a misnomer. It rusts. It corrodes. It just stains LESS than other metals. It’s also called Inox or CRES (for Corrosion REsistant Steel). Sometimes I think they should just call it CostMore Steel.

Like whiskey, not all blends of stainless steel are created equal, even though the guys at Home Depot would have you believe as much. There are a handful of common blends, dozens of lesser known types, and more than a hundred more known by specialists. Silverware and sinks, for example, are made of 304 stainless steel. Syringes and railings on boats are made of 316 stainless steel, which is also known as “food grade,” “medical grade,” and “marine grade.”Can you guess which name fetches the highest price?

That which we call a rose by any other name does indeed smell as sweet. 304 stainless steel is actually the designation given to it by SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers). The ISO (International Organization for Standards) calls it A2. BSI (British Standards) calls it 304S 18. ASTM (American Society for Testing and Materials) calls it S30400. JIS (the Japanese standard) calls is SUS 304. DIN (the German standard) calls it X5CrNi18-10. It’s also known as 18-8 stainless steel, because in addition to iron, it’s made of 18% chromium and 8% nickel. It’s also got .08% carbon, 2% manganese, .75% silicon, .045% phosphorous, .03% sulfur, .1% nitrogen. Got that?

Most stainless steel bolts are made in Italy or Switzerland, while most bronze bolts are made in Pennsylvania, and most mild steel bolts are made in Ohio, or Indiana, or Taiwan, or China. Stainless steel is not magnetic. Stainless steel bolts are cold-forged; nuts are hot-forged. 316 stainless steel is more corrosion resistant than 304 thanks to 2% molybdenum, but it is slightly weaker (and more expensive). And 316L — which has 1/5 the carbon — is more suitable for welding. Expect to pay even more for it, though.

One can learn to decipher the text on the head of a bolt without too much trouble. Bolts made by Lake Erie are marked with a little LE on the head; bolts made bu Nucor have a little n on the head. THE designates a Taiwanese company, not a definite article. Radial hatch marks on the head indicate a bolt’s strength, according to SAE specs. No marks is grade 2 (standard), 3 marks is grade 5 (automotive); 6 marks is grade 8 (construction). The grades matter: a grade 2 1/4″ bolt can safely hold 1,500lbs; while a grade 8 bolt of the same size can safely hold twice as much. In bigger bolts, the difference is more dramatic. A 1.5″ grade 2 can hold 52,200lbs, while a grade 8 can hold 189,700lbs.

Or look at it this way: Our 40-foot boat weighs 22,000lbs. To suspend her from a crane, you could safely use a 1.25″ grade 2, a 3/4″ grade 5, or a 5/8″ grade 8 bolt. I have no preference. And that’s allowing for a margin of error, too: a fastener’s “clamp load” is 75% of its “proof load,” and the proof load — the load under which a fastener deforms — is still less than its breaking load.

There’s lots more… a scary amount more… no end to it, really. Larry was right: this stuff is really cool.

-JW