After my posts comments on WD-40, I was PMed by a curious member on WD-40 being used on equipment by manufacturer reccomendation. I did a little looking around to see if I could find the information I was using from my memory and found conflicts with it. I'm putting my reply below so that anyone curious whether it should be used in saltwater can decide for themsleves whether or not to.
"Several years ago I was shipping a prototype aircraft wing across the ocean and we had fretting damage to the bearings. At first we thought the pins may have been too hard but that proved to be untrue. After investigating, I found the maintenance crew had used WD-40 to get the shipping equipment that had been resting outside working again. Not expecting anything, I pulled the MSDS and found it recommended against using on steels and other metals as a protective coating if you are on the coast. It claimed that on the beach it will break down in 48 hours. Immersed it was a matter of hours.
Based on that, I thought your question easy to answer. It didn't turn out so. I pulled an MSDS from the web today and found incompatibility listed as "strong oxidizing agents". Their webpage claims it is WD (Water Displacement) and recommends use in aquatic applications, including saltwater ones. Web searches found that chlorine is an oxidizer and that saltwater is frequently used as an aid to the oxidation process. Based on that and my previous experience, I'm skeptical that it is effective in saltwater environments, but the WD-40 people are claiming it. If you are interested in knowing, you may want to take a bucket of saltwater, coat a stainless bolt and nut, put them together and drop them in the bucket for a month. If a white flaky residue occurs, I wouldn't use it on anything expensive. If it doesn't, maybe the people at WD-40 are right. You might also drop in a weak electrical charge. If it doesn't react with a charge and time, it isn't going to.
I'll update my post in case someone else wants the information I found."
Cheers.
