The trouble with modern, low-maintenance rigs is that there isn't a lot you can do to maintain them, even if you want to. Stainless steel really does stain less, bronze does stain, but in a lovely way, and otherwise defies the ravages of time, and aluminum, especially when anodized, is basically forever. But all of these materials benefit from various forms of maintenance, so sailors can still do something to get more life - and higher margins of safety - out of their rigs.

   First, quality is vital; you can't maintain a Yugo into a Volvo. So if longevity matters to you, think in terms of return on investment. In the world of marine merchandise, we often pay ridiculous amounts of money for stuff that doesn't look very different from hardware store stuff. But more often than not, the price reflects, at least in part, the cost of building something that won't go to pieces at sea. If you are at all in doubt about the cost/benefit of something, start by making a close, skeptical comparison with a cheaper option. Is the level of finish the same? Smoother surfaces corrode more slowly than rough ones. Are the tolerances the same? If a manufacturer is using substandard materials, they are less likely to be fussy with machining. Does either piece look like something designed by someone with a Bright Idea, or someone with a Bright Idea who has been to sea? This one calls for judgement on your part, and if you haven't yet experienced things that might help inform that judgement, I'll have some suggestions in a moment. Meanwhile, get in the habit of seeing gear in the context of the ocean. For example, take Dyform wire, which has polygonal yarns, to maximize "meat", and thus strength. Early forms of it were notorious line chafers, because the polygons had relatively sharp edges. You could always spot a Dyform boat by the collection of lint stuck to the shrouds. Nowadays, Dyform has rounded corners, and is a very attractive standing rigging alternative, but I suspect that the original product was born somewhere in the engineering department, at the hands of people who weren't giving a lot of thought to what would happen when a rope or sail ran over their brainstorm.

   Okay, so you would have missed that one too, eh? Well, as a friend of mine once put it, "Tradition is so you don't have to make 200 years of mistakes." Although most of the boats we work on in this shop are about as untraditional-looking as can be, I have never regretted all the time I put into learning the niceties and rationale of traditional rigs. Partly this is because we still get to splice and serve quite often, but also because t\raditional rigging, by definition, encourages taking the long view, in the context of heavy use at sea Dealing with traditional rigs is a little like dealing with an old, deeply experienced sailor, and one of the characteristics of old, experienced sailors is that they hate doing unneccessary maintenance. So they figure out what causes things to wear out, and then come up with the easiest possible ways to prevent and treat wear.

   The point here is that maintenance is far from being a matter only of regular attention; it has a design phase that makes the regular attention meaningful. If you overhaul the cuspknuckles every fifth fortnight, good for you. But if better design or better overhauling techniques would mean that you only have to do the job once a year, then you've been wasting time and materials.

   So before setting up a maintenance program, get to know the system you'll be maintaining. Get to know the characteristics of the materials, the magnitude and nature of the loads, and how the environment speeds or retards deterioration. In the case of standing rigging, this means becoming familiar with righting moment, tune, climate, wire rope, alloys, terminals, and various forms of corrosion. There are a lot of people out there who know little or nothing about any of these things, and who nevertheless manage to do tolerable maintenance, but you can just bet that they could do it better with a little education and thought. I'm reminded of the fellow in Florida who had those little plastic covers on his shrouds, and knew that in his climate that corrosion could happen under there, especially at the bottom, where things are saltiest and wettest. So every time he went down to the boat he would slide the covers up, rinse off the wires with fresh water, and let them get some air. The wire under the covers was in good shape near the bottom, but one day the mast fell down because the wire had corroded away at the very top of the covers, the one place where water just sat all the time. He had been looking assiduously for chloride and stress corrosion, but wasn't up to speed on crevice corrosion.

   With all that said, here are a few things that would be good to have in any maintenance program for a modern, stainless-wire-and-aluminum-mast rig:

1. The abovementioned fresh water

   Salt is hard on metal, and it tends to accumulate given a chance, so rinse it away whenever you have the opportunity. Pay particular attention to things down near deck level, an be sure to get at sheltered places. These include mainsheet blocks - bearings and swivels - as well as furler bearings, all wire ropes, mast step, and tracks. If you have a full boat cover, be sure to rinse everything before putting it on, unless you're conducting a corrosion experiment on the effects of trapped, moist, salty air.

2. Isolate dissimilar metals

   I did a rig survey on an 80's boat the other day, and was delighted - no, astonished - to find that every one of the fasteners I checked had been bedded to prevent galvanic corrosion. This simple act will prevent the ugliest, most pernicious, frustrating, labor-intensive phenomenon in rigging. We spend ridiculous amounts of time removing corroded fasteners, and it is so preventable.

   So, go to you mast, right now. Take a close look at any of the stainless fasteners on it, screws or rivets. See any white powder around the head of the fastener? How about bubbling of the adjacent paint? If it is a screw, try removing it , and examine the threads. Any powder there? If it is a new boat, there might not be any corrosion. Yet. But there should be a noticeable amount of some form of paste or goo on each fastener, to isolate it from the aluminum (or carbon fiber0 that it goes into. Our favorite product for the purpose is Tef-Gel, but almost anything - silicone, Loctite, chewing gum - will make a difference.

   If you couldn't get the screw out, it is probably corroded into place, and you might want to look at the Spartalk entries from May 5, 1999.

   Be sure to check the fasteners on a range of fittings, as some might have been put in at different times and/or by different people. If you let this problem go, it can lead to so much aluminum corroding that there's only powder left to hold the fastener.

3. Tune

   Aside from performance and comfort benefits, rig tuning provides safety and rig longevity. This is because loose wire will get shock-loaded, which accellerates fatigue, and because tight wire will load cycle closer to its elastic limit, which also accelerates fatigue. It has to be just right. Fortunately, tuning is not a heavily mumbo-jumbo procedure. Unfortunately, there are a lot of alleged riggers out there who believe that tuning is a matter of tightening turnbuckles down as far as possible, or some other, equally irrational belief. Get our tuning video.

4. Lubricate

   Most of the winches aboard cruising vessels are crippled, to some degree, by either lack of lubrication, excessive lubrication, or by grease that has been on the gears for so long that it has hardened to the consistency of Playdough. Remember, winches are supposed to be labor-saving devices. But they are also fairly complex machines, so they require regular maintenance. This means strippping them down and regreasing them at least once a year, a job which is not nearly as onerous as it might seem, and which will reward you immensely. I once cleaned up some primaries that had gotten down to about a 1:1 purchase. The next time the boat went sailing, one of the owners almost went overboard when the winch presented an order of magnitude less resistance. They were happy about it, though.

   In general, the less you lubricate other items, the better. This is because, unlike winches, things like blocks and turnbuckles will readily collect dust and grit, especially if you slather some grease or oil on them. So think dry-coat for these items, or nothing at all.

5. Inspect

   Most rigs are constructed to human scale, with components readily monitored and replaced. But ya gotta look. Every trip aloft needs to be a survey trip, as the upper parts of the rig are the ones you see the least. And don't neglect the stuff on deck just because you see it all the time; it is precisely because you see it all the time that it is easy to miss things. We were aboard several boats recently that had so much corrosion around the mainsheet traveler fasteners that there wasn't much functional metal left; it's the kind of thing that leads to travelers coming out of the deck. But those fasteners were literally right in front of the place where the crew spends almost all of its time on deck. The heart of maintenance is being in the habit of noticing things.

   Next month: Surveyors Don't Know Jack About Rigging

   Fair leads,

      Brion Toss