cavelamb wrote:
John Cassara wrote:
Very Basic...........The dye gets trapped in the crack and causes the crack
to stand out better.


"Chris" wrote in message
oups.com...

So how does this dye test work?




But cables that have multiple strands will always look "failed"...
The dye gets trapped between the strands.

I had thought the 20 yrear old rigging on my 28' S2 was good because it
had no sharp spots and seemed to look good with close visual
inspection. BUT, the mast was down and I had read an article in
"Seaworthy" about rigging inspection with a magnifier so I did this. I
was shocked to find cracks in ALL of the lower swages. At first they
were hard to find but soon I learned that they are almost always under
a small rusty looking spot which you remove with fine sandpaper.. All
the cracks ran lengthwise in the swages and were in the body of the
swages rather than at the edge where the wire goes in.
Being curious, I decided to do dye penetrant testing. This showed
absolutely nothing at all as the dye would not go into the cracks for
some reason. The cracks were clearly visible under a 10X loupe and
were real cracks.
I replaced all of the rigging and lifelines. That was close.