Many years ago I bought a bucket of white painted screws and would replace as needed, I live at the beach and it was a never ending battle. Despite claims of stainless screws causing a reaction, several of my friends have replaced theirs with stainless, many years ago with no issue, myself now included. Go stainless and never worry about that tedious job again.
I am also having a new ATC built at the moment and sent a large box for the guys to use on my build so I don’t have to deal with it again.
That is very interesting, I have experienced the same results. I bought my 2003 Hawk in 2019 and 50% of the screws rusted within the first few months. I live within a 1/4 mi from the ocean myself. I started to replace with SS 316 screws, knowing full well about the galvanic corrosion issue with non passivated/coated stainless and aluminum. I got worried after reading here about doing this, so I started replacing the screws with galvanized. In 2023 now, all the stainless do not show any issues and the galvanized are about 50/50 rusted. Now I am just talking about the heads... The few stainless screws I've pulled look good however...
Also I'd say about 90% of my screws are hex flange heads. I have a hard time finding a quality galvanized version aside from cheap ones at Home Depot. Looks like the ones @buckland posted are panheads. Not sure if a previous owner swapped all mine out to hex, or?
Edited by bajaphile, 04 April 2023 - 02:36 PM.