Titanium Frame Building - A Blog Series

Like in any other news/informational arena, I see partial truths and alternative facts all over the place when it comes to titanium frame fabrication. About a decade ago, I started writing something, not quite as long as a book, but certainly longer than an informational pamphlet with the intention of publishing it through several bicycle news outlets. I contacted several long time builders who could be referred to as extremely knowledgable in the titanium frame building part of the bike industry to have them vet the information I wrote and while they enthusiastically endorsed the idea, I enthusiastically ran out of steam after writing about half the information I had planned on sharing with the public at large. It turns out that running a business, teaching framebuilding and mechanics on the side, while being a dad to a 3y/o and a newborn shifts your priorities a little bit and creating free content for educating people on what's OK and not OK for titanium fabrication slides down the priority list.

First things first. This isn't going to be a be-all end-all doctrine. I accept that there's more than one way to skin this cat BUT there are definitely ways to do it that leave the consumer with an inferior or dangerous product. My purpose is to make a designation as to what the ideal scenario might be, offer some alternatives and also point out what I think is not OK for titanium fabrication and why. I'm old enough that my memory for specific events in the 80's is a little fuzzy. I remember parts of a story about an auto maker who knew that they had a failure risk on their hands but chose not to do anything because the cost of fixing the failure was more than the cost of litigation. Guess what? That happens in the bike industry too. I had a chat with a guy who used to be an employee for a titanium fabrication house. He was telling me that on their highest end bikes, they had so much padding in the profit margin that they could afford to replace 10% of them before it affected their bottom line. He told me a few stories about specifics that he witnessed roll out the door, knowing those frames were going to fail but with the full willingness to replace them when they did. My understanding is that he wasn't in the production chain and was quickly rebuffed upon raising a concern BUT it goes to show that unseemly as it is, sometimes the dollars are more important than pride of worksmanship.

This is roughly how I intend to break this down.

1. Material selection - You likely know that material is produced in various nations around the world. Does it matter where? You've also read 'insider' terms like CWSR and annealed but do you know what they mean, how they apply to manufacturability and if you can even trust what the tube manufacturers tell you? Are the tubes even straight? What do you do if they're not? What about the hard parts...bottle bosses, cable guides, dropouts, BB's and head tubes? Do they matter? What about tabbed vs. hooded dropouts? Does weld wire matter?

2. Mitering - How important is miter angle accuracy? What about stays of slightly different lengths? What about tube phasing? Anything I should know about vent holes, gaps in the miters, tube end prep, different ways to miter? What's an inclusion and how do you get them?

3. Tube prep and cleanup - Mechanical cleaning, chemical cleaning, time frame, oxide growth

4. Welding - tungsten prep, back purge, gas coverage, root pass, single pass, double pass, triple pass? Are we going to talk about inclusions again? Weld color, distortion, sequence, frame twist, dropout alignment.

5. Frame prep - face, chase and ream but what about the rest?

6. Frame finishing - should it be scotchbrite, bead blast, sand blast, shot peened, anodized, painted?

7. Assembly - what's galvanic corrosion and how do I prevent it?