De Lorean, milk or wine trucks, lots of other chemical or food processing machinery ? There must be loads of uses for stainless bolts and nuts, otherwise nobody would care to produce them, just for the few nutty bikers ?? And in marine sector I believe they will like their ss fasteners, brass is just not good enough in places. As I said, some matters are religion views, without exactly stating the reasons why. Yes, typical common stainless is a bit lower strength than higher tensile steel, but better than homesupply galv screws and you´ll hardly find a place on a bike where it will be too weak. Some like their titanium, I´d be a little more worried about this for critical uses. Simple reason why you rarely find ss fasteners standard on new vehicles, it is too expensive in high production numbers, less profit for top brass.
As to seized ss threads , obvious reason, the mechanic had no clue about lube on threads, he does not lube spark plugs the same. So big money for Helicoil company for spark plug repair, the root of their invention. Stainless got no coating so seizure is logic, do same with alu or plain steel/iron , will seize just as fine when dry fitted. So simple procedure, get some MoS2 or antiseize paste on threads and there will be no trouble for decades, alternative is Loctite which will seal the threads at the same time. Again, I had ss fasteners for 40 years on all sorts of vehicles and more, never a problem. Nor is it any problem with metric stuff, only simpler handling with it. Just face it, the low numbers of imperial machines ever made from UK or USA present almost nothing compared to numbers from other continents in metric - and they don´t break down all the time. Millions and millions of Chinese , European and Japanese machines dwarf all imperial production for a reason . . . ., sorry I only got funny arguments here why imperial standards should make any sense to stay with them , just sentimentality really.
Yes, there will not be much of imperial fasteners left on my bikes but that crap I replaced is not worth much, - from Argentina. Whitworth - worth it ?? For shipping this to US with present costs definitely no . But this shows again that obsolete British fasteners are no longer, for a long time, practical for real use when you have to hunt them at silly collectors money. And I am no collector of old bolts when they do nothing for the looks. Instead when keeping to metric I have a choice of hardware that is no way available in imperial system, like countersunk Torx for my new brakes and hubs, so some flaws in the Vincent designs are overcome by knowing what was wrong with old components.
Vic