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A floating dock has to do two contradictory things — move freely up and down with the water, and stay exactly where you put it. Pilings solve both, but the piling isn't the part that matters. The connection is. Here's how pile hoops work, the two-inch clearance rule nobody publishes, and what happens when a roller seizes.

This gets treated as a budget question — galvanized if you're economising, stainless if you're not. That's the wrong frame. It's about chemistry, and for most people the answer is the cheaper one. Service life data for fresh and salt water, why 316 rather than 304, and why mixing the two is worse than either alone.

Aluminum truss docks are light, rot-free, and need no sealing - real advantages, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something. But steel has a fatigue endurance limit that aluminum doesn't, and a dock in moving water is a continuously cycled structure. Here's what that means for your site, and where each material earns its place.