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And even after you get past the manufacturing, titanium also seems to have some weird corner cases. I learned recently about metal induced embrittlement of titanium [0]. The Wikipedia article mentioned cadmium embrittlement of titanium, but is also possible with copper and silver. So if you have a silver plated washer pressed in to titanium it can cause issues.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal-induced_embrittlement




If I remember correctly, in Ben Rich's book he mentioned that LA's water in the summertime was chlorinated enough that the titanium welds on the early A-12 would sometimes fail because of a chemical reaction they didn't anticipate - they were embrittled because they were flushed with that water, I think?




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