From the course: Learning Underwater Photography

Preventing corrosion - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Learning Underwater Photography

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Preventing corrosion

- [Instructor] As we've been saying, the ocean is a pretty harsh environment when it comes to our underwater photo equipment. And, what we're doing is we're basically taking a block of metal and we're putting it in the ocean for up to a couple hours every day. And, eventually, that's going to cause some problems, especially with corrosion. So, we're going to discuss in this movie about preventing corrosion. So, the first type of corrosion we're going to talk about is galvanic corrosion. Now, the science behind galvanic corrosion, it's pretty complicated and I'm not going to get into that. But what we do need to understand is that this kind of corrosion occurs when two different metals are in contact in the presence of an electrolyte, in this case water. So, what's going to happen is, because they're two different metals and they're in contact, one of them is going to corrode at a faster rate than the other. So, we've got, actually, a couple different metals in contact in our housing. Generally, the housing block, itself, is made out of aluminum, but the handles and other things that attach to it are held in place by stainless steel bolts. So, what we end up with is an aluminum housing with some stainless steel bolts submerged in saltwater. So, the manufacturers anticipate this. And what they've done is they've installed a sacrificial anode. All you need to understand is that this is a little piece of metal that's designed to corrode faster than the other two types of metal. So, basically, it's a little piece of metal that's attached to the bottom of the housing that is meant to corrode. And you'll see this. It'll become pretty obvious after the second or third time you've taken your housing out. You'll see that it starts to look corroded. That's a good thing. It's supposed to. Now, these sacrificial anodes may need to be replaced, but, in general, they're designed to last the life of the housing. So, we're going to talk about how to prevent other types of corrosion using anti-corrosives. It's a good idea to use something like LanoCote, which is a marine metal protectant. So, this is something that they use on boats to keep the metal parts of the boat from rusting. It's basically a very durable, very thick type of lubricant. What we're going to do is we're going to take that LanoCote and we're going to put it on the bolts that penetrate the housing. As I've mentioned previously, the bolts that hold the handles to the housing. Saltwater over time is going to work its way in to where those bolts meet the housing. And, since that's not something we routinely open up and close again, that saltwater can stay in there and build up, even if we're rinsing our housing repeatedly in freshwater. So, by putting this LanoCote lubricant in those bolt holes, we're going to prevent that salt buildup over time. So, in this video, we looked at the two different types of corrosion that we're going to encounter taking our camera underwater. And we learned some tips on how to help prevent any issues from this corrosion.

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