I've got a lil titanium bowl for camping. Feels like alien material, it's so light and feels like you could snap it, but then it's incredibly strong. I used it in the oven last night to make TikTok feta pasta. No worries on being oven safe as its melting temp is 3,000°F.
I've also got their titanium flask. I had it engraved from a random guy on youtube who had experience engraving on Ti, because everyone else I contacted (mostly jewelry shops) could only anodize it.
Correcting myself, I was thinking of Zinc Oxide. But it's still pretty inert. I wouldn't want a plate of it, but whatever level of toxicity it possesses, it is low enough that it requires careful study to detect.
My materials science professor always used ring as an example in intro to matse classes of what not to do with titanium.
His point was that if you ever get into an accident and the first responders have to cut your ring for whatever reason (MRI machine, etc.), literally none of their tools would be able to do that on a titanium ring. None of the tools in hospital would work either. It may not always be feasible to pull it out the usual way.
"His point was that if you ever get into an accident and the first responders have to cut your ring for whatever reason (MRI machine, etc.), literally none of their tools would be able to do that on a titanium ring"
As a somewhat-experienced jeweler, titanium is not terribly-difficult to work. It's a pain to solder and weld (I use it for wire-wrapping in various gauges,) but cutting it is relatively easy, a good pair of hardened-steel thick wire cutters will absolutely shear it.
I got Tungsten Carbide rings for that reason (and they happen to also be extremely inexpensive). They’re very hard (scratch resistant) in everyday use, but also quite brittle and easy to shatter to remove
if needed for a finger injury.
Titanium is more flexible and softer than steel. It also has a similar melting temperature.
I've heard it's just harder to machine because it's more flexible so it tends to bend away from the cutting tools, as far as I understand. Not because it's so strong. But I don't know much about machining so this is second-hand knowledge.
It's just a hell of a lot lighter than steel which is why it's so great for cutting-edge aviation stuff. It's much stronger than aluminium. It's the strength/weight combo that makes it special.
The early 80s Corvette used titanium for the air filter cover. There had to be all sorts of bulletins for mechanics. Even though the cover was held on by large plastic thumb screws (and thus needed no tools for removal) it was a very convenient flat spot in the center of the engine compartment for placing tools on. The cadmium coating on hand tools will cause titanium to corrode, so don't use ordinary hand tools.
That's super interesting, I did not realize that. Isn't Cadmium banned nowadays? It's a pretty bad compound to ingest, especially in dust form. Not quite Beryllium Oxide but not exactly flour either.
Yeah I used to work in aerospace (defense) and was shown a large part, about 3 feet wide, with very complex geometry that was machined from a huge solid chunk of titanium. They said that one part was worth $1 million, on a vehicle that cost total $80m or so. I'm guessing a lot of it was due to difficulty in fabrication.
Very much unworkable. I got a chunk of titanium tubing at some point of my more metal oriented years and tried to do something useful with it, it ate up my tools pretty quickly. Typical standing time for a regular HSS bit was < 1 hole. Carbide did a bit better, but still that too went much faster than usual.
Titanium is very hard to work with; for instance the carbide coatings on many drill-bits can cause it to degrade over time. Tooling for production of the blackbirds was a challenge in and of itself, as little was known about working with titanium at the time.
