Stainless Steel Screw Standards
I purchased a large quantity of #8 stainless steel screws from BOLT DEPOT, to replace screws in my 14 year old 5th wheel. Most of the original screws had severe rust problems. Even screws that were c...
Forum Discussion
ktmrfs wrote:
1) there are a large number of types of stainless steel
2) not all stainless steel types are non magnetic. If it is not magnetic it is stainless, brass, aluminum etc. If it is magnetic it can either be stainless or "regular" steel.
to determine how stain free it is and how strong you need to know the grade of stainless and then look up that grade to see what it's properties are.
As to point 2: some stainless (SS) is austenitic (type 318 for example) and is non-magnetic. Other SS is Martensitic (type 400's) and is magnetic. The austenitic material has more nickel in the alloy and is usually more expensive. It has nothing to do with aluminum, brass ect.
Stainless is valued for being corrosion resistant not for high strength and SS screws heads are easily wrung off. If you want high strength then use steel. SS has other undesirable characteristics (galling for one). You just have to balance those against SS desirable features.
I suspect the SS screws were a bit too big for the holes you have, that required more torque to force the screws into the holes than the heads would take. You can get poor quality SS material, where I worked they got thousands of low quality SS screws that were imported over the more expensive US material, that caused a lot of complaining and I think they had to return the bad batch finally.
