I recently had Chivers lift my boat, a 6.8 Seaquest, off the trailer and hardstand it whilst I did some minor work on the trailer.  It was showing minor, and I mean minor, corrosion on the guards and cross members with very light rust spots and white "greying" in evidence on the bottom edges of several.

After a close look I took to those minor rusted areas with a powered wire brush to clean it off in preparation for cold galvanising however I came across a ten cent piece sized lump in the glav finish which the wire brush wouldn’t shift.  It looked odd so I grabbed a hammer and gave it a tap only to have the hammer go straight through?   What the hell  !!……….beneath what appeared to be perfect gavanising was nothing, the steel had not rusted per se but had delaminated into grey flat pieces which were as brittle as hell.

Needless to say I then proceeded to hammer test all of the cross beams only to find three out of the four to be severely degraded yet to the untrained eye they looked perfect.  I regret not taking photos of the before and after but the after was a real eye opener.
It was almost as though white ants had eaten away like they do with wood which looks perfect from the outside but in reality is nothing more than a paper thin coating hiding the damage.

Back to Chivers with the now holey (appropriate for this time of the year) trailer – to say they were similarly shocked would be an understatement.  We quickly agreed that repairs were simply not an option and Luke arranged for a brand new chassis to be constructed minimising the cost to me by reusing all salvageable elements of the old trailer.  As you might expect the end result is brilliant – thanks Luke, on time and on budget but to those on this site just a note to look far more closely at your trailers as the hot dip finish might just be hiding a potential disaster in the making.  I was lucky and that is the only word for it having towed the boat only weeks before down to Dunsborough – had one of those cross members failed you could bet the rest would have gone almost simultaneously risking dumping the boat on the road or potentially rolling the lot and putting lives at risk

Have a great and safe Christmas and holiday period all at Fishwrecked