Page 312 - The Complete Rigger’s Apprentice

Using less tar and adding some thinner (Solvex with thinned tar or other wire preservative first. This
or Xylol is good) makes a good bare-wire slush. is one reason to use stainless steel seizing wire.
Straight boiled linseed oil or mineral oil is less Another hidden rust spot is under any item that
effective but tidier, anhydrous lanolin thinned with is lashed to served wire. Unless the service is covered
mineral oil is also good, and I’ve recently found with a chafe-resisting layer of leather or canvas, the
that Marvel Mystery Oil applied generously and lashing can cut through the service and expose the
allowed to soak in is an excellent wire preservative. wire.
There are also some extremely expensive wire pre- Swages are much trickier to inspect for cor-
servatives developed for industry, which, if you can rosion than a served splice; about the only way to
find them in small amounts at bargain prices, are tell anything’s happening inside a swage is to have
very effective. Wear gloves and a respirator when it crack from internal pressure or fatigue. Eva Hol-
working with them. All preservative coatings can be man recommends tapping swages with a tool handle
applied with a paintbrush. to determine their condition. With a little practice
It’s most convenient, of course, to slush the you can learn to tell the hollow sound of a corroded
rigging when the sticks are out; if they’re in place swage from the live ring of a solid one.
and you have to work aloft, you will find on your
return that your deck is spattered with hundreds of Fatigue To Holman’s four surveying rules I would
droplets of slush. To avoid this, bend a springline add a fifth: stainless steel fatigues. No, this is not
onto the anchor rode while at anchor and pay out an all-metal army uniform. It refers to the charac-
on the rode to form a bridle. This will put you at teristic of alloyed steels of hardening and becoming
right angles to the wind, so that as you slush the brittle with age. The more heavily a piece of alloy is
lee rigging, those spatters will hit the water instead. stressed relative to its ultimate strength, the faster it
Turn the boat around to slush the other side. And will fatigue. Therefore, you’d survey lightly rigged
don’t do this bridling procedure in a crowded har- race boats for fatigue more carefully and sooner
bor unless your neighbors to leeward don’t mind a than heavily rigged cruisers. Also, the warmer the
tarred bootstripe. climate, the faster stainless will fatigue, as the con-
Bare wire is not as long-lived as served wire, tribution of salt is enlarged.
but a little attention will keep it from dying prema- Fatigue reveals itself with cracks. Sometimes
turely. Any one of the various slush recipes will do small, “Gee-I’m-glad-I-spotted-that” cracks; some-
for galvanized wire. I recently replaced a couple of times “Oh-my-God-I-could-drive-a-truck-into-
40-year-old shrouds that had been treated exclu- that-thing-and-it’s-holding-up-the-jibstay” cracks.
sively with zinc chromate; they were just about worn Sometimes the cracks have a zigzag pattern, caused
out, but a little tar or anhydrous lanolin a few years by what is called stress corrosion. This can come
ago would have gotten them to the half-century
mark with ease.
The most-often-unlooked-for place for galva- Fatigue
nized wire to rust is at the throat of the splice, at the In his wonderful book, To Engineer Is Human,
pointy end of the thimble. Even competent splicers Henry Petroski notes that 50 to 90 percent of
will sometimes neglect to “diaper” this spot ade- failures in engineered objects result from fatigue.
quately. The result will be that salt water will splash There is no certain way, he says, to prove, non-
destructively, that a new object is free of internal
up inside and rust the throat, while the rest of the flaws. So engineers posit the existence of flaws
wire stays like new under its service. small enough to escape detection when new, then
A wire seizing made with galvanized seizing wire figure how soon use will increase their significance
sufficient for detection, and schedule examinations
can rust from the inside out, even though brightly for then.
painted on its surface, if the wire isn’t rustproofed

291