What Is Galling in Metals? An Engineer’s Guide to Prevention & Repair

An Engineer’s Nightmare: What is Galling in Metals?

Before we dive into the war stories and the deep science, here is the essential information you need to understand and defeat galling. This is the cheat sheet I wish I’d had when I started my career.

This table is the what, why, and how in a nutshell. But to truly understand the visceral, project-destroying nightmare that galling represents, you need to see it fail in the real world. At my company, RM (Rapid Manufacturing), we don’t just see galling as a textbook definition; we see it as a costly enemy to be outsmarted every single day. And my first real battle with it taught me a lesson I’ll never forget.

Let me tell you a story. Early in my career, long before RM, I was working on a high-purity fluid system for a pharmaceutical client. Everything was stainless steel—the pipes, the valves, the flanges, and hundreds upon hundreds of stainless steel bolts and nuts. The assembly was a thing of beauty. Clean, gleaming, and built to last. Or so we thought.

During the final pressure testing, a small leak was detected on one of the main flanges. “No problem,” the lead mechanic said, “I’ll just give that nut another quarter turn.” He put his wrench on the nut, and he pulled. It didn’t budge. He got a longer wrench. He pulled harder. Still nothing. A sickening, grinding feeling told us this wasn’t just a tight nut. We eventually had to cut the bolt off, damaging a multi-thousand-dollar custom flange in the process.

What we experienced that day wasn’t rust. It wasn’t a stripped thread in the traditional sense. It was something far more destructive, a phenomenon that engineers both fear and respect: galling.

In the simplest terms, galling is a severe form of adhesive wear that can occur when two metal surfaces slide against each other under pressure. Instead of the surfaces smoothly gliding past one another, they momentarily weld themselves together on a microscopic level. As the movement continues, these tiny welds are torn apart, ripping chunks of material from one surface and transferring them to the other.

This isn’t a slow, graceful process like erosion. It’s a violent, instantaneous tearing and smearing of the material. It leaves surfaces rough, gouged, and permanently damaged. In the case of a threaded fastener like our stainless steel bolt, this microscopic welding and tearing happens all along the thread flanks. The result is a dramatic increase in friction, and if it’s bad enough, the nut and bolt effectively become one solid, seized piece of metal. This final, catastrophic stage is called seizing.

The Microscopic Crime Scene: What’s Really Happening?

To understand galling, you have to stop thinking of metal surfaces as being perfectly smooth. Even a beautifully machined and polished piece of stainless steel, when viewed under a powerful microscope, looks like a mountain range. It’s covered in microscopic peaks and valleys called asperities.

When you bring two of these “mountain ranges” together under pressure—like when you’re tightening a bolt—only the very tips of the highest peaks are actually touching. This means the entire load is concentrated on an incredibly small surface area, generating immense localized pressure and friction.

Here’s the chain of events that leads to galling:

1. Breaching the Protective Layer: Many metals, especially stainless steel, are protected by a very thin, invisible layer of oxide. For stainless steel, it’s a chromium oxide layer that makes it “passive” and corrosion-resistant. Under the high pressure and sliding motion of tightening, this protective oxide layer is scraped away from the tips of the asperities, exposing the raw, highly reactive metal underneath.
2. Adhesion and Cold Welding: With the pure metal exposed, the atoms on one surface are now in direct contact with the atoms on the other. With no oxide layer in the way and under immense pressure, the atoms can’t tell which surface they belong to. They form strong metallic bonds, creating a microscopic “cold weld” between the two peaks.
3. Tearing and Material Transfer: As you continue to turn the nut, this tiny weld is immediately put under shear stress. But the weld is often stronger than the base metal underneath it. So, instead of the weld neatly breaking, a chunk of metal is ripped out from the weaker of the two surfaces and remains stuck to the other.
4. Escalation and Seizing: Now you have a bigger, rougher peak on one surface, which gouges an even deeper trough into the opposing surface, creating more heat, more friction, and more opportunities for cold welding. This creates a catastrophic feedback loop. The friction skyrockets, heat builds up, and the surfaces become a mess of torn, smeared metal until the resistance becomes so great that the fastener locks up completely. The bolt seizes, or worse, the head of the bolt twists right off.

Distinguishing Galling from Its Cousins

It’s crucial for engineers and mechanics to understand the difference between galling and other forms of wear. Misdiagnosing the problem leads to the wrong solution.

• Galling vs. Abrasion: Abrasive wear is what happens when a hard, rough surface slides against a softer one, or when hard particles get trapped between two surfaces. Think of it like sandpaper. It’s a cutting or scratching action. Galling is an adhesive action; it’s about sticking and tearing, not scratching.
• Galling vs. Fretting: Fretting (or fretting corrosion) is a specific type of wear that happens with very small, repetitive oscillating movements, like in a vibrating joint. It often looks like a reddish-brown or black stain from oxidized wear debris. While it involves adhesion, the scale of movement is much smaller than in galling, which typically occurs during larger, continuous sliding motions like tightening a fastener.
• Galling vs. Corrosion (Rust): This is the most common confusion for beginners. Rust is a chemical reaction—the oxidation of iron. It’s a slow process that eats away at the metal. A rusted bolt is difficult to remove because the rust itself takes up space and binds the threads. Galling is a mechanical, physical process that happens in seconds and can occur even with highly corrosion-resistant materials like stainless steel. In fact, it’s most common with them.

The Prime Suspects: Why Stainless Steel is So Vulnerable

This brings us to the great irony of galling. The very properties that make stainless steel and other alloys so useful—their corrosion resistance and ductility—also make them prime candidates for galling.

At RM, we work with dozens of grades of stainless steel, from the common 304 and 316 to more exotic alloys. We have to be constantly vigilant about galling, especially with austenitic stainless steels (the 300 series). Here’s why they are so susceptible:

• The Passive Layer: As I mentioned, the chromium oxide layer is tough but incredibly thin. High point loads can easily scrape it away, exposing the pure, sticky metal underneath.
• High Ductility, Low Hardness: Austenitic stainless steels are relatively soft and very ductile (meaning they deform easily without fracturing). This is great for forming and fabrication, but it means that when those microscopic welds form, the material underneath is soft enough to be easily torn away. A harder, more brittle material might see the weld fracture before any significant material transfer occurs.
• Similar Crystal Structure: When you use a stainless steel bolt on a stainless steel nut of the same or similar grade (e.g., a 304 bolt on a 304 nut), the atoms in both pieces are arranged in the same crystal lattice structure. This makes it incredibly easy for them to bond and form those cold welds. There’s no crystallographic “mismatch” to help prevent adhesion.

This vulnerability isn’t limited to stainless steel. Other materials known for galling include titanium, aluminum, and other alloys that form a passive oxide layer and have high ductility. At RM, we have a saying that I drill into every new engineer and machinist: “When in doubt, assume it will gall.” It’s a philosophy of prevention that has saved us countless hours and dollars.

Understanding the enemy, as we did in the first section, is a crucial first step. But in the world of engineering and manufacturing, theory doesn’t solve problems—strategy does. At RM (Rapid Manufacturing), galling isn’t an abstract concept; it’s a line item on a risk assessment, a potential budget-killer, and a direct threat to the integrity of the high-performance assemblies we create for our clients.

Over the years, we’ve developed a multi-layered defense strategy against this microscopic menace. It’s not about finding one single magic bullet. It’s about building a robust system of prevention where each layer works to reduce the risk. This is the exact playbook I use with my team.

The First Line of Defense: Smart Material Selection

The most powerful decisions you can make to prevent galling happen long before a wrench ever touches a bolt. They happen on the designer’s screen and on the material specification sheet. If you know you’re entering a high-risk situation—high loads, stainless steel fasteners, critical joints—you must engineer the problem out from the start.

The Hardness Mismatch Rule

This is one of the oldest and most effective tricks in the book. The core principle is simple: avoid using two metals of similar hardness sliding against each other. Ideally, you want a significant difference in hardness between the two components.

Think back to the mechanism of galling: two surfaces of similar ductility and hardness cold-welding and tearing chunks out of each other. When one surface is significantly harder than the other, the dynamic changes. The harder material’s asperities act more like a plow, smoothly deforming or cutting the softer material rather than adhering to it. While this still causes wear (specifically, abrasive or ploughing wear), it is far more predictable and far less likely to result in catastrophic seizing.

At RM, a common rule of thumb we apply is to ensure a hardness difference of at least 50 Brinell (HB) between mating threaded parts. For example, instead of using a standard 316 stainless steel bolt with a 316 nut, we might specify a strain-hardened (cold-worked) bolt, which is significantly harder, to be used with a standard, softer annealed nut. The harder bolt threads are much less likely to have material torn from them, and the softer nut material will deform more readily without seizing the assembly.

The Dissimilar Metals Strategy

This is an extension of the hardness mismatch rule, but with a more fundamental, chemical basis. The single most effective way to prevent two components from wanting to “become one” is to make them fundamentally different from each other.

I learned this lesson the hard way on a marine project. We were assembling a large stainless steel frame for use in a saltwater environment. The lead engineer, a grizzled veteran with decades of experience, walked by and saw our team preparing to use standard 316 stainless nuts on 316 stainless bolts. He stopped dead in his tracks. “Son,” he said to me, “you’re building a thousand-dollar bomb. Every one of those fasteners is going to seize solid the minute you put a load on them.”

He made us switch every nut to a silicon bronze equivalent. Bronze is a copper-based alloy. Its crystal structure, chemical makeup, and mechanical properties are completely different from stainless steel. There is simply no atomic-level desire for the steel and bronze atoms to form the strong metallic bonds that define a cold weld.

The result? The assembly went together flawlessly, even at high torque values. We had created a tribological pair that was inherently resistant to galling. This is now a core part of the RM design philosophy. For critical bolted joints, especially in stainless steel, we will almost always specify a dissimilar nut, such as:

• Stainless Steel Bolt with a Bronze (e.g., Silicon Bronze, Aluminum Bronze) Nut: This is a classic, highly effective combination.
• Stainless Steel Bolt with a Nitronic 60 Nut: This brings us to the superstars of the anti-galling world.

Nitronic Alloys: The Anti-Galling Superstars

For applications where you absolutely cannot compromise on corrosion resistance and cannot use a dissimilar metal like bronze, there is a family of “super” stainless steels designed specifically to resist galling. The most famous of these is Nitronic 60.

Nitronic 60 is an austenitic stainless steel, but it’s heavily alloyed with manganese and silicon. These elements give it a unique characteristic: an ability to self-lubricate under load. In a high-pressure sliding scenario, the material’s surface layer transforms and forms a very thin, hard, and slick “glass-like” layer (a manganese-silicate complex) that acts as a built-in barrier between the mating surfaces. It effectively prevents the base metal from ever coming into direct contact.

At RM, we specify Nitronic 60 for our most demanding applications—things like valve stems, high-performance threaded inserts, and critical adjustment screws in aerospace components. It’s significantly more expensive than standard 304 or 316 stainless steel, but when you factor in the cost of a single seized component in a multi-million-dollar assembly, the price is trivial. It’s the ultimate insurance policy against galling.

The Most Powerful Weapon: Lubrication and Coatings

While material selection is the ideal first step, it’s not always possible to change the materials. In the vast majority of real-world scenarios, you’re working with the fasteners you’re given—often, stainless on stainless. This is where the second layer of our defense comes in: creating an artificial barrier between the sliding surfaces.

Understanding Anti-Seize Compounds

If you walk through our assembly area at RM, you’ll see a small pot of silvery or copper-colored paste next to almost every workstation. This is anti-seize compound, and for mechanics and assemblers, it is the single most important weapon against galling.

An anti-seize compound is not a simple grease. It’s a suspension of very fine solid lubricant particles in a grease or oil carrier. The carrier (the grease) is just there to hold the solids in place and provide some initial lubrication. The real magic comes from the solid particles. When you tighten a fastener, the immense pressure at the thread asperities squeezes out the liquid grease, but the solid particles are trapped. They physically separate the peaks of the metal surfaces, preventing any metal-to-metal contact and thus making cold welding impossible.

Think of it like throwing a layer of microscopic ball bearings between the threads. These solids are chosen for their ability to withstand extreme pressures and, in many cases, extreme temperatures.

Choosing the Right Anti-Seize: A Comparison

Not all anti-seize is created equal. Using the wrong type can be ineffective or, in some cases, even cause other problems like galvanic corrosion. At RM, we have a clear chart for our technicians to follow.

For 90% of our stainless steel assembly at RM, a high-quality, metal-free or nickel-based anti-seize is the standard protocol. A small dab, applied with a brush to the leading threads of the bolt, is all it takes to transform a high-risk assembly into a smooth and predictable one.

Beyond Greases: Advanced Coatings

For permanent or critical assemblies where a paste lubricant is undesirable, we turn to advanced coatings. These are thin, bonded layers applied to the fastener that provide a permanent anti-galling surface.

• Dry Film Lubricants (DFLs): These are spray-on coatings containing lubricants like Molybdenum Disulfide (MoS₂) or PTFE (Teflon) in a binder. After being applied, they are cured (often by baking), leaving a hard, dry, and slick surface. We use these on adjustment screws and mechanisms that need to be repeatedly adjusted without the mess of a wet lubricant.
• Silver Plating: In the extreme world of aerospace and vacuum applications, a thin layer of silver plating is often applied to stainless steel or titanium threads. Silver is an incredibly effective solid lubricant at high temperatures and in vacuums where traditional greases would fail or outgas.
• Proprietary Coatings: Many companies offer specialized proprietary coatings like Melonite (a form of salt bath nitriding) or various polymer-based coatings that dramatically increase surface hardness and lubricity, making the fastener highly resistant to galling.

Mechanical and Assembly Best Practices

The final layer of our defense strategy has nothing to do with chemistry or metallurgy. It’s about process and technique. How you put the components together is just as important as what they’re made of.

The “Speed Kills” Philosophy

Remember that friction generates heat. The faster you tighten a fastener, the more heat you generate in a shorter amount of time. This heat causes the metal at the asperities to soften and become even more likely to weld together.

This is why, at RM, the use of high-speed pneumatic or electric impact wrenches on stainless steel fasteners is strictly controlled and often forbidden for final assembly. While they are great for quickly running down a nut, the final, critical torque must be applied slowly and deliberately with a calibrated torque wrench. This slow speed minimizes heat buildup and gives the assembler a “feel” for the joint. A smooth, steady increase in resistance is good. A sudden, jerky, or grinding feeling is an immediate red flag that galling is starting to occur.

Thread Quality and Cleanliness

This seems obvious, but it’s the number one cause of problems in the field. Galling needs a place to start. A thread that is already damaged from mishandling, has a burr from manufacturing, or is contaminated with dirt or metal shavings is a pre-made initiation site for galling. The debris acts like an abrasive, scraping away the oxide layer, while a damaged thread creates a high-pressure point.

Our rule is simple: Inspect and clean every critical thread before assembly. A quick wipe with a clean cloth and a visual inspection can save hours of rework. If a thread is visibly damaged, the component is rejected. Period.

We have a multi-layered defense: smart material choices, the right lubrication, and careful, deliberate assembly techniques. By combining these strategies, we transform galling from an unpredictable disaster into a manageable engineering variable. We control the conditions, so it cannot occur.

A junior technician is in a hurry. A lubricant is missed. A thread is slightly damaged but goes unnoticed. And then it happens. That smooth, satisfying resistance of a tightening fastener suddenly turns into a gritty, binding, and then utterly immovable lock-up.

This is the emergency room of mechanical engineering. The damage is done, and the goal is no longer prevention, but crisis management. What do you do in the critical moments when a component begins to seize? And when the battle is lost, how do you perform the “autopsy” to ensure it never happens again?

The Crisis: Responding to a Seizing Fastener

I can tell a new technician’s experience level by how they react to the first sign of galling. The novice, driven by a goal-oriented mindset, will often try to “push through it”—add more force, get a longer wrench. This is, without exception, the worst possible thing you can do. It’s like seeing a fire start and deciding to throw gasoline on it.

That extra force completes the cold weld, turning a localized microscopic seizure into a catastrophic, full-thread fusion. You will not win this fight.

The Golden Rule: STOP. BREATHE. REVERSE.

The moment you feel that unmistakable gritty binding, your training must take over.

1. STOP: Immediately cease applying tightening force. Do not add another fraction of an inch-pound.
2. Breathe: Take a second. Panic is your enemy. You are now a surgeon, not a construction worker.
3. Reverse: Gently and slowly, attempt to reverse the direction of the fastener. If it moves, even a little, you have a chance. Work it back and forth—a quarter turn back, an eighth turn forward, a quarter turn back.

The goal of this gentle rocking motion is to break the microscopic welds that have just started to form without generating the shearing force that will tear the material and create more damage.

Your Best Friend: Penetrating Oil

As you work the fastener back and forth, you need to introduce a new element to the equation: a high-quality penetrating oil. This is not the same as the anti-seize compound we used for assembly. Penetrating oils (like Kroil or PB B’laster) are extremely low-viscosity fluids designed to wick into the tightest of spaces through capillary action.

Their job is to get into the still-intact parts of the thread, providing lubrication where there was none and helping to flush out any microscopic debris that may have initiated the problem. I’ve seen a seized fastener that felt completely hopeless be saved by a patient technician with a can of penetrating oil and 15 minutes of careful, deliberate back-and-forth work. It’s a testament to the power of responding correctly in a crisis.

Advanced Technique: Thermal Shock

In some situations, a little heat can be your ally. This is an advanced technique and carries risks, so it should be used with caution. The principle is thermal expansion. If you can heat the outer component (the nut) faster than the inner component (the bolt), the nut will expand slightly, increasing the clearance and helping to break the static friction of the galled area.

This is best done with a focused heat gun, not an open flame like a torch, which can damage the components or ruin their heat treatment. A quick, localized application of heat to the nut, followed immediately by an attempt to loosen, can sometimes be the key that unlocks a frozen joint.

When the Battle is Lost: Destructive Disassembly

Sometimes, despite your best efforts, the component is irretrievably seized. The cold weld is too extensive, and no amount of finesse will break it loose. At this point, the mission changes. You are no longer trying to save the fastener; you are trying to save the much more expensive component it’s threaded into. This requires a different set of tools and a destructive mindset.

At RM, we call this the “surgical extraction” phase.

The Scalpel: The Nut Splitter

This is the most elegant and preferred method of destructive removal. A nut splitter is a C-shaped hardened steel tool with a sharpened, chisel-like screw. You fit the tool over the nut, and as you tighten the screw, its sharpened point is driven into one of the flats of the nut. The immense hydraulic pressure cracks the nut open, instantly releasing its grip on the bolt threads. It’s a clean, precise method that, when done correctly, leaves the bolt and the parent material completely unharmed. Every one of our field service kits at RM contains a set of high-quality nut splitters.

The Chainsaw: Abrasive Cutting

When a nut splitter can’t be used due to clearance issues, we have to resort to less precise methods. This usually involves an angle grinder or a rotary tool (like a Dremel) with a cut-off wheel. The goal is to carefully slice through one side of the nut, being extremely cautious not to cut into the threads of the bolt or, even worse, the flange of the component it’s holding. This method is fast but messy and carries a high risk of collateral damage. It requires a steady hand and a great deal of experience.

The Final Resort: Drilling Out the Bolt

This is the most time-consuming, skill-intensive, and riskiest procedure. It’s reserved for when the head of a bolt has sheared off or when a stud has seized in a blind hole. The process is a nerve-wracking form of surgery:

1. Center Punch: Perfectly mark the exact center of the broken bolt. If you are off-center, you will drill into the threads of the parent material, destroying it.
2. Pilot Drill: Use a small, high-quality (cobalt or carbide) drill bit to drill a perfectly straight pilot hole down the center of the bolt.
3. Step Up: Incrementally increase the drill bit size, hollowing out the bolt.
4. Extract: Once the bolt wall is thin enough, you can either try to break it apart with a punch or use a screw extractor (a reverse-threaded, tapered tool) to hopefully back out the remaining shell.

This process is a minefield. A broken screw extractor in the hole is a far worse problem than the original seized bolt. It’s why this is always our last and most dreaded option.

The Autopsy: Turning Failure into Process at RM

Saving or removing the part is only half the battle. At RM (Rapid Manufacturing), we have a simple rule: every failure is a tuition payment for our education. If we don’t learn from it, we’ve wasted the money. This brings us to the most important part of the entire process: the failure analysis.

Case Study: The Galled Actuator Valve

I’ll never forget the call. A high-value pneumatic actuator we built for a pharmaceutical client was binding during its final on-site calibration. The client’s technician, under pressure to get the line running, put a wrench on the stainless steel adjustment screw and tried to force it. It seized solid. The entire multi-thousand-dollar actuator was now a paperweight.

The client shipped it back to us, and my lead engineer and I took it to the lab. This was our “autopsy.”

1. The Extraction: We had to mill away the housing to expose the seized screw, destroying the component in the process. This was the cost of our education.
2. Microscopic Analysis: We put the galled threads under a scanning electron microscope. The images were brutal but telling. We saw the classic landscape of galling: smeared, torn metal that looked more like sculpted clay than precision-machined steel. It was a textbook case of adhesive wear.
3. The Smoking Gun: As we examined the intact threads away from the failure zone, we noticed something was missing. Our assembly protocol explicitly called for a specific Molybdenum Disulfide (“Moly”) paste to be applied to these threads. Under the microscope, we could find no trace of it. The characteristic dark, lamellar structure of the MoS₂ was completely absent.
4. The Root Cause: We traced the assembly log and interviewed the technician who built the unit. He was a good, experienced tech, but he admitted that he had been working late to meet the deadline and, in his haste, had simply forgotten to apply the anti-seize compound.
5. The Corrective Action: This single, expensive failure led to one of the most important process improvements we ever made at RM. We instituted a new protocol called “Lubrication Verification.” Now, for all critical assemblies, a second technician must verify the application of the correct lubricant before the fastener is installed. Furthermore, we implemented the use of a bright yellow, tamper-proof torque seal lacquer. This visible mark is applied over the fastener head and the housing only after the final torque has been applied and lubrication has been verified.

Now, a quality inspector can see from ten feet away if the process was followed. That one galled screw cost us thousands of dollars, but the process it forced us to create has saved us hundreds of thousands in the years since. It turned a human error into a robust, reliable system.

A Final Verdict on Galling

Galling is not a mysterious black magic. It is a predictable, physical phenomenon governed by the laws of friction, adhesion, and material science. It preys on ductile, sticky metals under high pressure.

It can feel like a random disaster, but it is anything but. It is a direct result of a failure in one of the layers of our defense. A failure in design, a failure in lubrication, or a failure in assembly technique.

By understanding the enemy, arming yourself with the tools of prevention, and having a clear plan for when things go wrong, you can transform galling from a source of fear and frustration into a solvable engineering challenge. You control the conditions. You build the robust process. You turn every near-miss and every failure into a lesson that makes your work more reliable, more professional, and more valuable.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What’s the difference between galling and seizing?

Galling is the process, and seizing is the result. Galling is the specific type of adhesive wear where surfaces cold-weld and tear. Seizing is the general term for when components become locked together and can no longer move. Galling is one of the primary causes of seizing in threaded fasteners.

Is galling the same as rust or corrosion?

No, they are completely different mechanisms. Rust (oxidation) is a chemical reaction where iron reacts with oxygen to form iron oxide. Galling is a purely mechanical phenomenon caused by friction and adhesion between two sliding surfaces. Galling can happen in seconds, while corrosion typically happens over a much longer period.

Can galling happen with non-metal materials like plastics?

Generally, no. Galling is a phenomenon unique to metals, especially those with a ductile nature and a tendency to form strong metallic bonds. Plastics and polymers can experience other forms of wear (abrasive, fatigue), but they do not cold-weld in the same way metals do.

Why is stainless steel so notorious for galling?

It’s a perfect storm of properties. Stainless steel is very ductile (gummy). Its passive oxide layer, which protects it from corrosion, is very thin and easily scraped away under pressure, exposing the highly reactive, pure metal underneath. Finally, it has relatively low thermal conductivity, meaning the heat generated by friction tends to build up right at the surface asperities, making welding even more likely.

Is there a truly “galling-proof” material?

Nitronic 60 comes very close for a stainless steel alloy due to its unique self-lubricating surface mechanism. However, no material is completely immune under the absolute worst conditions. The ultimate “galling-proof” solution is not a single material but a robust system of correct material pairing, proper lubrication, and disciplined assembly techniques.

References

1. Nickel Institute – “Stainless Steel Fasteners“: An authoritative guide from the leading industry association, which includes a detailed section on the causes and prevention of galling.
2. Special Metals Corporation – “INCONEL, INCOLOY, NIMONIC, UDIMET, MONEL and NILO alloys“: Provides material data sheets, including information on high-performance, galling-resistant alloys used in extreme environments.
3. Swagelok – “Galling and Other Preventable Headaches“: A practical and well-written article from a leading manufacturer of high-quality fittings, offering real-world advice on preventing galling in stainless steel components.

Disclaimer

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