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As a kid in my father's workshop we had several 4mm thick titanium plates, scavenged from some industrial stuff in USSR research facility nearby. I had a lot of

As a kid in my father's workshop we had several 4mm thick titanium plates, scavenged from some industrial stuff in USSR research facility nearby. I had a lot of fun getting my visiting friends tey to dent it with hammers. No matter how hard you struck it just didn't care. Only the oxidation patina would show some trace of impact. It was absolute magic to me. And so incredibly light!

cyberax 3y ago
When the USSR collapsed, a lot of defense companies pivoted to civilian production. A factory in my town was producing titanium shovel heads. They were awesome, unbelievably light, but very durable. They also made nice sparks when dragged across concrete pavement.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Damn, imagine having a titanium shovel! I want one!
  - avs733 3y ago
    https://nearzero.co/products/shovel https://nearzero.co/products/shovel They exist! Meant for backpacking/back country work. I spent a summer as a wilderness search and rescue intern/volunteer/grunt/mule during college and was shocked at how much weight could have been saved with better gear. There’s just a minimal market for it.
    - amluto 3y ago
      That company sells titanium pots, too. And they say “ Titanium leaves no metallic smell or taste.” I don’t believe it. Titanium is, mechanically, a great material for a lightweight pot, but in my limited testing, I don’t think it’s inert enough. Green tea in a titanium pot is especially nasty.
      - therein 3y ago
        I had similar experiences with titanium cookware. Could it be acting as a catalyst to something that would otherwise not happen?
        amluto 3y ago
        I don’t know. My current favorite cooking surface is the coating used on Hestan Nanobond. It’s sold as “titanium” but, from reading the patent, I think it’s a bunch of layers of CrN, TiN, and AlN, applied by PVD in a process optimized to produce an attractive gray color that looks a bit like metallic titanium. It seems very hard, very durable, and does not obviously react with any kind of food. (And even if it did, unless something oxidized the Cr to +6 and made it soluble, nothing that might leach out seems likely to be harmful.) The patent seems to expire fairly soon, and maybe the process will take off. I wonder if this coating could be applied to a lightweight titanium pot with good results.
      - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
        In the backpacking and bicycle-travel community, titanium pots are widely regarded as good only for boiling water in, since they don't distribute heat as well as aluminium for more complex cooking.
        amluto 3y ago
        I’m well aware, but I don’t really believe this :). As far as I can tell, no very thin pot or pan distributes heat well [0], and no very thin pan cleans up well from cooked-on food when the cleaning supplies at hand while backpacking. [0] Concretely, this means that, when cooking solid food, the parts of the pan where the food isn’t sinking heat adequately get too hot.
        OfSanguineFire 3y ago
        The non-stick aluminium pans from MSR, and perhaps other brands, do clean up well from food after cooking. In my experience (hundreds of nights of cooking while cycling the world), it is enough to wipe them clean with a dedicated towel or wet-wipe in order to pack them, and then they can be washed completely the next time one reaches a convenient water source.
    - tuatoru 3y ago
      Oh, there's a market for lightweight backpacking gear, all right! Check out Backpacking Light for in-depth reviews. Garage Grown Gear has some of the trendy light and ultralight stuff. 1. https://backpackinglight.com/ https://backpackinglight.com/ 2. https://www.garagegrowngear.com/ https://www.garagegrowngear.com/
- myself248 3y ago
  Decades ago, Sears sold magnesium stepladders. I've used one, and it's freakishly light, a 6-foot step ladder that you can walk around with balanced on one finger. I've always wondered what a titanium one would be like.
  - petertodd 3y ago
    A lot heavier actually. In an application like a stepladder, you have to work with certain minimum dimensions for the stepladder to be practical (eg rungs and sides have to fit in the hands nicely). You also have to have certain minimum thicknesses on the parts to have sufficient resistance to local deformation (eg dropping a hammer on the rungs). That forces the parts to be significantly larger and stronger than they otherwise would be. Which makes very lightweight metals like magnesium and aluminum the better choice, as you can make thick parts at the required dimensions at very little weight. Climbing gear is a great example of this. Even though there's a segment of that market for which money is no object, the only use for titanium in climbing gear is certain specialized applications where corrosion resistance is important. Eg fixed gear mounted on sea-side cliffs. Because climbing gear has to have certain minimum dimensions to avoid damaging ropes, the very low density of aluminum wins over titanium's higher density/higher strength. If you made a carabiner out of titanium it'd be stronger than necessary, and a lot heavier.
    - londons_explore 3y ago
      If you can 3D print titanium, then you can make a honeycomb structure overcoming this problem.
      - bch 3y ago
        What is the response to stress by this build method? Will it fail gracefully over a lifetime of stresses? Any single big stress-event? In terms of (rigid, diamond-frame) bicycles, this is why I’m still firmly in the steel camp. No aluminium, no carbon; just steel. It really does have an excellent combination of nice ride quality, low weight, high strength, good failure mode (I’ve broken a few frames, and they tend to just bend/sag, vs the rapid unscheduled disassembling of carbon/Al).
- saiya-jin 3y ago
  Mountaineering ice screws. Its a dream for pro alpinists, since you have to drag every gram up there in thin air, so focus on weight saving is extreme, ie drilling holes into aluminum spoons before 8000m expeditions was normal in 70s-80s in eastern Europe block. Normal stainless steel ones are much heavier.
petertodd 3y ago
Those must have been soft hammers. Titanium isn't magic. It's neither as hard, nor as strong, as steel. It's a lot lighter, which makes it a wonder material in certain applications that can take advantage of it's excellent strength-to-weight ratio. But if max hardness, or strength at a given size, is what you are after, without a weight constraint, steel wins.
- saberience 3y ago
  I mean, I'm no materials scientist but one google tells me that Titanium is AS strong as steel but much less dense. I just browsed through the top 10 Google results and everyone states that titanium is roughly equal to steel in strength but with various other benefits. So your comment is definitely off-base somewhere, you make it seem like steel is much stronger, which clearly isn't the case.
  - AlotOfReading 3y ago
    Steel's strength varies by orders of magnitude depending on the alloy and heat treatment. It's an incredibly flexible family of materials. Some members of that family are far stronger than anything in the titanium family, e.g. 4340 steel has a nominal yield strength of >1800 MPa, compared to <1300 MPa for Ti 10-2-3.
    - saberience 3y ago
      We're not talking about exotic and expensive varieties of steel though. We're just talking about "general" or common steel and comparing it to unalloyed "common"/"general" titanium. Remember, Steel is itself an alloy, Titanium is an element. If you start comparing Titanium alloys to Steel then the comparison gets even harder. Titanium alloys are in general stronger than steel as well as much lighter and more corrosion resistant.
      - petertodd 3y ago
        > We're not talking about exotic and expensive varieties of steel though. 4340 steel isn't exotic. It's one of the most commonly used grades of steel out there, and it's much cheaper than titanium. There are steels out there with significant stronger yield strengths too. Meanwhile the highest yield strength of any Ti alloy is <1300MPa. Titanium is still a really great material in certain applications. But it's not magic. You have to use it intelligently in the right application to get a benefit from it.
Turing_Machine 3y ago
The article mentions that the Soviet Union had lots of titanium ore, and also that it was heavily used in the A-12/SR-71 family of aircraft. I remember reading elsewhere that the CIA set up a bunch of front operations across the world to buy titanium (or maybe titanium ore) from the USSR without them finding out what it was being used for. They didn't want the "Ship to:" part of the order form reading "Lockheed Skunkworks, Burbank Califoria". Heh.
- dendrite9 3y ago
  There's an interesting story about trading Boeing aircraft design knowledge for Soviet titanium design knowledge during the cold war. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/the-titanium-gambit-3804526/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/the-titani...
- pests 3y ago
  Elsewhere would of course be the excellent "Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed" by Ben Rich. Highly reccomended and goes into further engineering and design challenges of the RS-71 Blackbird and its titanium construction.
muz754 3y ago
Some hammers might not be that hard - you don’t want it to blow up in your face if you’re hitting a hardened steel tool.
- psd1 3y ago
  I do not like my hammer hard! I do not like a face of shard! I like to whale upon a tool A shattered hammer is not cool!

cyberax 3y ago

When the USSR collapsed, a lot of defense companies pivoted to civilian production. A factory in my town was producing titanium shovel heads. They were awesome, unbelievably light, but very durable. They also made nice sparks when dragged across concrete pavement.

hef19898 3y ago
Damn, imagine having a titanium shovel! I want one!
- avs733 3y ago
  https://nearzero.co/products/shovel https://nearzero.co/products/shovel They exist! Meant for backpacking/back country work. I spent a summer as a wilderness search and rescue intern/volunteer/grunt/mule during college and was shocked at how much weight could have been saved with better gear. There’s just a minimal market for it.
  - amluto 3y ago
    That company sells titanium pots, too. And they say “ Titanium leaves no metallic smell or taste.” I don’t believe it. Titanium is, mechanically, a great material for a lightweight pot, but in my limited testing, I don’t think it’s inert enough. Green tea in a titanium pot is especially nasty.
    - therein 3y ago
      I had similar experiences with titanium cookware. Could it be acting as a catalyst to something that would otherwise not happen?
      - amluto 3y ago
        I don’t know. My current favorite cooking surface is the coating used on Hestan Nanobond. It’s sold as “titanium” but, from reading the patent, I think it’s a bunch of layers of CrN, TiN, and AlN, applied by PVD in a process optimized to produce an attractive gray color that looks a bit like metallic titanium. It seems very hard, very durable, and does not obviously react with any kind of food. (And even if it did, unless something oxidized the Cr to +6 and made it soluble, nothing that might leach out seems likely to be harmful.) The patent seems to expire fairly soon, and maybe the process will take off. I wonder if this coating could be applied to a lightweight titanium pot with good results.
    - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
      In the backpacking and bicycle-travel community, titanium pots are widely regarded as good only for boiling water in, since they don't distribute heat as well as aluminium for more complex cooking.
      - amluto 3y ago
        I’m well aware, but I don’t really believe this :). As far as I can tell, no very thin pot or pan distributes heat well [0], and no very thin pan cleans up well from cooked-on food when the cleaning supplies at hand while backpacking. [0] Concretely, this means that, when cooking solid food, the parts of the pan where the food isn’t sinking heat adequately get too hot.
        OfSanguineFire 3y ago
        The non-stick aluminium pans from MSR, and perhaps other brands, do clean up well from food after cooking. In my experience (hundreds of nights of cooking while cycling the world), it is enough to wipe them clean with a dedicated towel or wet-wipe in order to pack them, and then they can be washed completely the next time one reaches a convenient water source.
  - tuatoru 3y ago
    Oh, there's a market for lightweight backpacking gear, all right! Check out Backpacking Light for in-depth reviews. Garage Grown Gear has some of the trendy light and ultralight stuff. 1. https://backpackinglight.com/ https://backpackinglight.com/ 2. https://www.garagegrowngear.com/ https://www.garagegrowngear.com/
myself248 3y ago
Decades ago, Sears sold magnesium stepladders. I've used one, and it's freakishly light, a 6-foot step ladder that you can walk around with balanced on one finger. I've always wondered what a titanium one would be like.
- petertodd 3y ago
  A lot heavier actually. In an application like a stepladder, you have to work with certain minimum dimensions for the stepladder to be practical (eg rungs and sides have to fit in the hands nicely). You also have to have certain minimum thicknesses on the parts to have sufficient resistance to local deformation (eg dropping a hammer on the rungs). That forces the parts to be significantly larger and stronger than they otherwise would be. Which makes very lightweight metals like magnesium and aluminum the better choice, as you can make thick parts at the required dimensions at very little weight. Climbing gear is a great example of this. Even though there's a segment of that market for which money is no object, the only use for titanium in climbing gear is certain specialized applications where corrosion resistance is important. Eg fixed gear mounted on sea-side cliffs. Because climbing gear has to have certain minimum dimensions to avoid damaging ropes, the very low density of aluminum wins over titanium's higher density/higher strength. If you made a carabiner out of titanium it'd be stronger than necessary, and a lot heavier.
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    If you can 3D print titanium, then you can make a honeycomb structure overcoming this problem.
    - bch 3y ago
      What is the response to stress by this build method? Will it fail gracefully over a lifetime of stresses? Any single big stress-event? In terms of (rigid, diamond-frame) bicycles, this is why I’m still firmly in the steel camp. No aluminium, no carbon; just steel. It really does have an excellent combination of nice ride quality, low weight, high strength, good failure mode (I’ve broken a few frames, and they tend to just bend/sag, vs the rapid unscheduled disassembling of carbon/Al).
saiya-jin 3y ago
Mountaineering ice screws. Its a dream for pro alpinists, since you have to drag every gram up there in thin air, so focus on weight saving is extreme, ie drilling holes into aluminum spoons before 8000m expeditions was normal in 70s-80s in eastern Europe block. Normal stainless steel ones are much heavier.

petertodd 3y ago

Those must have been soft hammers. Titanium isn't magic. It's neither as hard, nor as strong, as steel. It's a lot lighter, which makes it a wonder material in certain applications that can take advantage of it's excellent strength-to-weight ratio. But if max hardness, or strength at a given size, is what you are after, without a weight constraint, steel wins.

saberience 3y ago
I mean, I'm no materials scientist but one google tells me that Titanium is AS strong as steel but much less dense. I just browsed through the top 10 Google results and everyone states that titanium is roughly equal to steel in strength but with various other benefits. So your comment is definitely off-base somewhere, you make it seem like steel is much stronger, which clearly isn't the case.
- AlotOfReading 3y ago
  Steel's strength varies by orders of magnitude depending on the alloy and heat treatment. It's an incredibly flexible family of materials. Some members of that family are far stronger than anything in the titanium family, e.g. 4340 steel has a nominal yield strength of >1800 MPa, compared to <1300 MPa for Ti 10-2-3.
  - saberience 3y ago
    We're not talking about exotic and expensive varieties of steel though. We're just talking about "general" or common steel and comparing it to unalloyed "common"/"general" titanium. Remember, Steel is itself an alloy, Titanium is an element. If you start comparing Titanium alloys to Steel then the comparison gets even harder. Titanium alloys are in general stronger than steel as well as much lighter and more corrosion resistant.
    - petertodd 3y ago
      > We're not talking about exotic and expensive varieties of steel though. 4340 steel isn't exotic. It's one of the most commonly used grades of steel out there, and it's much cheaper than titanium. There are steels out there with significant stronger yield strengths too. Meanwhile the highest yield strength of any Ti alloy is <1300MPa. Titanium is still a really great material in certain applications. But it's not magic. You have to use it intelligently in the right application to get a benefit from it.

Turing_Machine 3y ago

The article mentions that the Soviet Union had lots of titanium ore, and also that it was heavily used in the A-12/SR-71 family of aircraft. I remember reading elsewhere that the CIA set up a bunch of front operations across the world to buy titanium (or maybe titanium ore) from the USSR without them finding out what it was being used for. They didn't want the "Ship to:" part of the order form reading "Lockheed Skunkworks, Burbank Califoria". Heh.

dendrite9 3y ago
There's an interesting story about trading Boeing aircraft design knowledge for Soviet titanium design knowledge during the cold war. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/the-titanium-gambit-3804526/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/the-titani...
pests 3y ago
Elsewhere would of course be the excellent "Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed" by Ben Rich. Highly reccomended and goes into further engineering and design challenges of the RS-71 Blackbird and its titanium construction.

muz754 3y ago

Some hammers might not be that hard - you don’t want it to blow up in your face if you’re hitting a hardened steel tool.

psd1 3y ago
I do not like my hammer hard! I do not like a face of shard! I like to whale upon a tool A shattered hammer is not cool!