Looking forward, it’s pretty clear that eventually our chainplates will need replacing. Crevice corrosion is almost impossible to stop, and is likely to lead to eventual failure. Whether that is one year from now, or twenty is not clear. We still have nine more chainplates to pull – the first three showed modest corrosion. What if we pull one and it’s in terrible shape??
A few comments on the “hairpin” chain plate design on the Nic 38. Looking at this as an engineer (well, actually I’m a physicist), there are some interesting design decisions that were made. Basically, I think it’s a brilliant design with multiple redundancies built in.
As Brion Toss said at this year’s Seattle Boat show, if your boat is more than 20 years old and has spent any time at all in warm climates, you have to pull those chain plates. So during that nice sunny spell we had recently, we did pull a few, and Brion was right – the chain plates need some TLC. To get to the punchline early, the ones we looked at are not ready to fail. But of course you want to know the whole long saga so keep reading.