Steel boat questions

Steel underwater doesn't rust very quickly. It's the steel above the water (or near the waterline) that rusts. Rust requires oxygen after all.

One problem with unpainted aluminum boats is that the aluminum quickly acquires a layer of oxide. This oxide rubs off on your clothes, hands, and whatever else touches it. That's one of the reasons you see aluminum boats with unpainted topsides, but painted decks and cabins where people need to touch it. Aluminum is harder to keep paint on than steel.

DDW said:

Steel underwater doesn't rust very quickly. It's the steel above the water (or near the waterline) that rusts. Rust requires oxygen after all.

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That is quite true. I had a through hull moved during refit to make room for stabilizers. The welding burned the epoxy base coat and the folks at the yard didn't prep the surface affected well enough to prevent it from sloughing off, leaving more or less bare metal. The location was around 5 feet below the surface and the oxygen was thin enough that it really didn't rust much at all.

How does the price

ClarkeGillespie said:

Oh yeah. Linssen makes boat for the US market. I just meant it’s not feasible to convert a euro bot for the us. You can do it on the cheap but it won’t be insurable. I was surprised in the differences in euro and US spec boats. I thought it was plugs and appliances. It’s everything starting at the wiring sizes. I’m not opening that box.
The questions about steel boats in the US is why I’m here asking questions I suppose. Steel is the the bogey in the night. All you hear is vague warning but nothing real specific. Besides small pleasure boats almost everything is steel so how can it be that terrible? The more I think of it the more I lean to steel being a real viable option. Linssen has a very thorough paint repair kit so if I take care of things it should be a 30-40 year hull before anything major would pop up. It sure won’t have spongy decks or rotted core issues like every glass boat has if bedding isn’t perfect.
Now I just need money. Lots and lots of money.



Clarke

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Of steel compare to a similar fiberglass biat?

"I take care of things it should be a 30-40 year hull before anything major would pop up."

Perhaps , most steel boats die from the inside out.

So at a certain point the interior will need to be removed , the hull sand blasted to "water white" your favorite brew of protection installed layer by layer , and the interior tossed back in.

Even with a simple work boat interior this AINT cheap, with fine joinery the boat is usually transported to a low cost labor country..

Poland used to do a 45fter for $5000 US your paint and finishes back about 1970, today I guess India or Viet Nam might do the labor.


Add rewiring , engine work and a noisemaker and its big bucks , even with $1.00 an hour labor.

Again, a lot of advice from people with little to no first hand experience owning steel boats, repeated over and over.
The most recent steel boat we owned was built in 1978. It was built before the "better" epoxy coatings were widely available. It was built without proper limber holes in the stringers to provide drainage. It had stainless welded directly to the mild steel, at right angles and without fairing compound, so the paint had little chance of adhering well. It had places in the interior that were inaccessible without a hours of work disassembling the furniture. It had lazy owners that would rather sail, watch whales, drink wine.... than maintain the hull. It had rust. We kept the boat looking good, but there was always rust creeping out somewhere.


All that said, the boat is 40 years old. Every 5 years we paid for a complete ultrasound for insurance, and every haul-out I personally sounded the hull in suspect areas. Hull wastage never measured outside acceptable limits, and there were no areas that had been cut out and replaced, so this was all original plating.
40 years with hard use and marginal care, and there was nothing that posed a threat to hull integrity. You can say that this is just one example, but metal boat owners talk a lot to each other, and this was pretty much the norm with everyone we interacted with. Keeping up with rust and corrosion is no big deal. You want to scare the **** out of a metal boat owner, start talking about stray current. That and resale value are the only two realistic downsides to a metal boat.