Yellow7
Über Member
- Location
- Milton Keynes
Working in the non destructive test (NDT) industry predominantly for the gas & oil industry we often receive titanium drill-string (sea-bed oil drilling) pipes for analysis & inspection. It takes a reasonable amount of time to acquire the skills to fabricate anything using it, including a bike frame, but if a frame has been welded with said skills then it would take as much stress without fatigue or crack-creepage occurring.
“Basically to get the same strength of steel the tubes need to be thicker hence you lose the weight saving” This is not a strength issue, both materials have very similar strength characteristics, a titanium bike uses thicker tubes to give the required stiffness characteristics needed on a loaded bike. Using the same size titanium tubing the bike would appear rather ‘squidgy’ / sagging due to it’s modulus of elasticity being half that of steel, hence the need for thicker tubing, but the strength is comparable.
This short page gives a brief summary rather well; http://www.differencebetween.net/object/difference-between-steel-and-titanium/
On my last tour to down-grade the appearance of the bike [frame] I covered the entire frame in black gaffa tape (double sided strips against itself so it wasn’t stuck to the frame directly) yet still had people saying how wonderful the bike looked and would I sell it!!
As far as “you can pretty much get a new frame sent out to anywhere in the world” is easy to say sitting from the comfort of ones computer but in the world of reality it’s not quite as easy, I’ve been there, albeit not for a frame.
“Basically to get the same strength of steel the tubes need to be thicker hence you lose the weight saving” This is not a strength issue, both materials have very similar strength characteristics, a titanium bike uses thicker tubes to give the required stiffness characteristics needed on a loaded bike. Using the same size titanium tubing the bike would appear rather ‘squidgy’ / sagging due to it’s modulus of elasticity being half that of steel, hence the need for thicker tubing, but the strength is comparable.
This short page gives a brief summary rather well; http://www.differencebetween.net/object/difference-between-steel-and-titanium/
On my last tour to down-grade the appearance of the bike [frame] I covered the entire frame in black gaffa tape (double sided strips against itself so it wasn’t stuck to the frame directly) yet still had people saying how wonderful the bike looked and would I sell it!!
As far as “you can pretty much get a new frame sent out to anywhere in the world” is easy to say sitting from the comfort of ones computer but in the world of reality it’s not quite as easy, I’ve been there, albeit not for a frame.
