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.
