I keep hearing about steel wool rusting in/corroding Aluminum, but does
anyone have actual evidence?


Yeah, the mast on my sailboat as done by a previous owner of the boat.
It has some serious cosmetic corrosion and small pitting (but didn't
effect the mast's functionality) where the PO used steel wool to
remove some boat adhesive he accidently got on the mast. There were
small pits in that area. This is not as serious as aluminun to
stainless steel hardware bimetalic corrosion. SOP for a boat mast is
to used threaded bolts, not self tapping screws and to tap the hole.
Then we put in some version of Loctite (don't remember which one there
are many varieties of Loctite) designed for the purpose and sold at
boating stores among many other places. That minimized the bimetalic
corrosion effect. I never had any problems with the masts on my
sailboat after I enlarged the corroded holes a size larger and then
tapped them and put the SS machine screws in. Using anything other
than 316 SS screws is inviting disaster on a boat. Hardware starts to
fall off boats.

BTW my small sailboat sank last year, but that had nothing to do with
corrosion. My larger boat was donated to the Sea Scouts and I'm out
of sailing now. Wife (and crew) has had arthritis and had a triple
bypass a years ago. I just can't send her up the mast anymore :-).

Jon W3JT