Everything You Didn’t Know About Titanium Bikes

Titanium is a material that many people consider the best, but what is

titanium

really? How is it different from other materials? Why on earth would you make a bike out of it? To

know

more. I'm going to talk to a

titanium

bike expert. it feels softer the cost is always high what you are really paying for is energy higher density than aluminum lower density than steel higher rigidity than aluminum lower rigidity than steel last much longer but not very strong robust Tom is the man behind tough

bikes

and has been making custom titanium

bikes

since 2014 using a combination of titanium tubes as well as 3D printed sections and components.

Tom has qualifications in aerospace engineering and sports biomechanics, which in my opinion makes him the perfect person to help answer my questions. Let's start from the beginning and find out what titanium really is. So, titanium is a 22nd element on the periodic table. When talking about its use on bicycles, it is very rarely used in its pure form. So, you can use pure titanium metal for various things, but most of the time when it is used to make something like a bicycle or anything structural, it will be alloyed with other elements, so it is normally tested with aluminum and vadium in different quantities.

I like to change to change its properties, so why wouldn't you use titanium alone? Yes, pure titanium. It can be a little confusing because many of these alloys will have many different names and they are all very similar, so yes, it can be confusing, but pure titanium, it has many of the useful characteristics of titanium, so it does not corrode very, very , very slowly. Basically, it's corrosion resistant, but it's not very strong, so it will bend quite easily. It also fatigues quite easily, so in terms of trying to make a titanium bike, how are we going to do it?

Is it shaped like a tube? Is it shaped and then assembled together to give us an explanation for that? Yeah, so that's probably the main drawback. about titanium is that it's difficult to work with and that means different ways of working with metal, so it's very difficult to change its shape and that's normally one of the challenges, but usually it will. um it will be used in a tube shape, so this is a stretched tube um and then yeah, the tubes will be cut to size, butted against each other and welded together um you can also change their shape in other ways um, so yes, to make bikes it can sometimes be cast or 3D printed and you can get different shapes that way, you can also machine it, usually the alloy you would use for the tubes would be different than the alloy you might use for a piece of Machin, so this is like a machined part.

This is a chain ring. You have done it at home. So explain to us how the heck we go from something that looks like this to something that looks like this. Yeah, so this is raw material. Well, it comes out of a large bar and you cut a small portion of it, and then this is a grade of titanium that is better suited to machining, it has a fairly high strength, but it would be very difficult to make tubes. From this grade of titanium it can be made and some companies do, but it presents challenges as the material becomes brittle and that kind of thing, so this is very suitable for machining, so in this case, yes, this will be, we will keep it. this on a CNC machine and gradually remove the material until we are left with that, so I guess it's the same principle as you have with other materials, there are slightly different versions that are modified to suit the application, so in In terms of like looking at that titanium tube, how does something like that compare in its similar properties to a steel tube or an aluminum tube?

What are the differences, especially if we look for similar profiles and shapes? Yeah, so Titan Titanium is um, it sits like this. Yeah, if we're thinking about the materials that bikes are built out of, titanium is pretty much in the middle in terms of its mechanical properties, so if you had the exact same tube and it was made of aluminum, the aluminum. It would be lighter than this, yeah, um, but it would be very rare for you to have an alanium tube with that thickness because aluminum wouldn't be strong enough at that thickness, so an aluminum tube would have to be thicker to be strong. , thicker, so the actual weight difference when you use it in a practical sense would be less than the theoretical difference in terms of just the density, but yes, titanium has a higher density than aluminum and a lower density than steel. higher stiffness than aluminum lower stiffness than steel uh strength will vary depending on the alloy so it falls pretty well in the middle of the range of mechanical properties certainly for metals that would be used to make bicycles so you can use it to then design and build a pretty wide range of bike types, you can make hardtail bikes, flex bikes that fit the balance of what you want to achieve, yeah, in terms of looking at bikes in general built and ready to ride, which are?

Some of the reasons why someone might want to consider maybe a detent bike instead of an aluminum one or a steel one or maybe even a carbon one, so there's a lot of different considerations I think generally speaking in the Bicycle industry tends to different materials. have these different assumptions about it, so people will often assume that a carbon bike rides in a particular way or performs in a particular way and the same applies to aluminum titanium, which titanium is famous for to be quite comfortable, it's actually not as simple as saying that because you've made a titanium bike it's going to be comfortable, it would be very easy to make a titanium bike uncomfortable, well, generally speaking, it's going to have these kinds of sweet spots, because of the inherent properties of titanium. and then when you start turning it into a bicycle, it can tend to produce bicycles that are quite comfortable.

There are other reasons, so it's essentially corrosion resistant, so it won't rust like a steel bike, it won't corrode like an aluminum bike. Could it be easy to care for in the sense that since it doesn't corrode you don't need to paint it, so you don't have to worry about scratching the paint? You

know

, that kind of thing you know you can put together. all year round, you don't have to worry about riding it, what about in terms of sturdiness? Actually, when people talk about carbon fiber frames, one thing they say is "oh, you have to be careful with it, you don't want to hit it." incorrectly or is only strong in certain directions, so how would titanium compare in that regard?

So titanium is, I mean, it's inherently probably more robust in some ways than a composite just because it's a metal and metals are homogeneous, so they have the same strength in all directions, so yeah, it's not like a carbon tube that if you crush it incorrectly you could damage it. You could dent the titanium if you hit it hard enough, but it's relatively difficult to do so. It's pretty strong, but every material has its limit, so generally speaking, titanium has a really good fatigue life and is very strong, for its weight, actually, in absolute terms, it's also very strong, so which is generally pretty robust, but there is no such thing. something like something that's not indestructible is something that people often say when you talk about Tain bikes it's like all there is like titanium Buzz that you get is that and what the hell how would you explain that to someone who wouldn't know what to expect um , so it's to a certain extent, yeah, so the property of the material is quite um for a better one, it's quite an elastic material, yeah, um, so it tends to respond slightly differently to, for example the vibrations that are they get from riding on a road, you know, that kind of Road Buzz, like high frequency stuff, yeah, it's going to respond differently to other materials just because of its underlying properties, so yeah, I think as a general rule, bicycles Titanium they do.

It feels softer to ride than other materials, but it would be a bit of an oversimplification to say that any titanium bike will do because everyone likes the build quality. I guess so, in terms of price when Look, I think Tanian bikes, I think it's fair to say that generally you could say that you see a lot more custom titanium bikes than you see in other materials, but how Would you classify a titanium bike as a material in terms of price compared to other materials? Yes, the main disadvantage of the material from the consumer's point of view is that the cost is always high, so titanium as an element is quite abundant, there is a lot of it on Earth, but it is very difficult to find. getting it from its kind of raw ore form to a useful material and basically what you're really paying for is energy and energy costs are perpetually skyrocketing and they're never going to go down, so titanium will.

It will always be a relatively expensive metal from that point of view and because it is difficult to work with, for example machining the chainring, yes, if you were machining the exact same shape in aluminum it would take a fraction of the time because it is quite difficult. working with titanium and keeping it in the right condition, so the problem really is that titanium bikes will always end up being more expensive and that's why they tend to be used not at the lower end of the market. um and yeah, it tends to be the high end custom type, okay, yeah, that's interesting.

There's also an additional way to get started with tanium, which is something you're a big fan of, so tell us more. about something like this 3D printed lever, yeah, so 3D printing is becoming more and more a common way to use and work with metals, you know, alum, aluminum, titanium and steel can be printed. One of the nice things about this is that, because titanium is very difficult to shape into a particular shape. 3D printing is a great way to achieve this. Of course, there are strengths and weaknesses to using additive manufacturing, period, but it's a great way to give raw materials a shape you want.

I want for some design application an intricate piece like exactly that, so we use it a lot so you know a particular design intent from a performance standpoint and an aesthetic standpoint. We use it a lot in conjunction with, for example, machining. So instead of starting with a big block and removing a lot of material, yeah, when you can, if you compare this, it's crazy, isn't it? So additive manufacturing can be a really useful way to, you know, you can print something. that's pretty much the shape you need and then machine the rest um and you can also do it with plaster, there are different strength benefits one way or another um and of course in a sense for me for my application on each bike.

What we do is different and custom 3D printing has an obvious advantage because you don't have to pay the tooling costs of a cast part. A really interesting point that, well, is covered in a lot of really important and useful information about titanium. A key question. What I want to ask you is do you think we'll ever see titanium bikes and parts start to become more common and more common or do you think it'll remain that kind of not quite an elusive material, but a little bit more of a material? niche rather than something that is mainstream, I think it will go down.

Its cost is probably the main factor to consider because it is so expensive as a raw material that it is difficult to work with or certainly slow to work with all those things. The costs that are added to the already high cost of raw materials are difficult to reduce, you know, I don't see an easy way to reduce them. There's sort of more automation built into the processes. like additive manufacturing and machining as well, but I think the main problem with using it on a really widespread level is that yes, it's going to come down to the fact that the cost and as we're seeing at the moment, one of the big problems with bikes is that there aren't many at the lower end of the market, so yeah, it certainly doesn't seem like a material that's going to lend itself to the budget end of the scale. or as an entry point into cycling and I guess as you said, if the raw material cost is already high even in the future with whatever technology and processor is developed, if you can then reduce the processing cost, you are already at a point starting higher, so it will always be difficult, yes, exactly, I mean that piece of titanium that makes that chainring that you are just buying that piece of material is already several times more than what it would cost me to buy a chainring of already finished aluminum, but I guess there's potentially the argument on the other side of this, is that while chaining is more expensive in the initial outlay, it could last a piece of aluminum several times over, yes, and that's one of the reasons for which, for example, that is one.

One of the reasons we make those Chang rings is that they last a long time.more, so the kind of lifespan of the part will probably work out about the same, if not a little cheaper, depending on how you want to do it, which is actually a good point. So yes, titanium will be priced high, changes are unlikely, but one of the big advantages is its strength, robustness and the possibility that it can survive and perform better than other different materials many times over, yes certainly, You know, the bikes that we make here, they're all intended as lifetime bikes, you know, I hope those bikes will be around for as long as their owner wants to ride a bike, and that's certainly something that maybe you wouldn't say about other materials that inherently They don't have such a long lifespan.

I mean, for me, that's one of the keys. advantages and advantages of titanium and I think that's what also attracts other people as a material of choice um yeah, I think we've covered pretty much

everything

I could think of to talk about um well Tom, thank you very much for your time, I hope you can I found this video interesting and informative. I certainly know I enjoyed talking to Tom and for me a titanium bike is one I want to have but unfortunately it still seems to be a little out of my price ranges but remember all things bike and Bike Tech related subscribe to gcn Tech because it also helps support what we do well see you later