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Titanium has an undeniable "cool factor" due to its use in aerospace, but everyone needs to understand that this is just a case of material science nerds doing

Titanium has an undeniable "cool factor" due to its use in aerospace, but everyone needs to understand that this is just a case of material science nerds doing something cool in a lab, and there will be no "widespread use in industry" even if they do fix the other issues mentioned in the article - and even if someone manages to figure out a way to viably scale up the process to an industrial level. The reason? Titanium sucks to work with. Machinists hate it, equipment hates it, cutting tools hate it, and it makes shavings that can burn hot enough to go right through equipment and concrete floors. That's what makes titanium parts so expensive, not just the material cost alone. It absolutely has properties that make it a perfect material for specific situations, but making it cheaper to buy definitely won't make titanium a common every day thing. So - enjoy the science! Give a round of applause for the cool new method this team figured out. And then go back to appreciating how wild it is that titanium parts can even be produced at all, because holy smokes is it a pain in the rear in almost every way...

mjb 1y ago
Titanium fires sure are scary. But there's a good amount of chicken and egg here: expensive material limits demand, which limits progress on manufacturing techniques, which keeps part prices high. I would expect that significant manufacturing method progress would be made if there was a step change in the price of titanium stock. And I wouldn't overstate the machining difficulty. Sure, it's a pain in the rear, and expensive, but can be done on regular machines with the right tools, techniques, and processes. I've made a couple of titanium parts myself.
- adastra22 1y ago
  But there’s also the base chemistry: titanium doesn’t behave like steel, and the chemical differences are why it is such a pain to work with, not inexperience.
  - adrian_b 1y ago
    The chemical difference between titanium and steel is mainly that titanium has a much higher reactivity with oxygen and nitrogen, the main constituents of air. Like with aluminum, this high reactivity is masked in finite products made of titanium, because any titanium object is covered by a protective layer of titanium dioxide. What is worse in titanium than in aluminum is that titanium has a low thermal conductivity, so a small part of the titanium can become very hot during processing, which does not happen with aluminum, where the remainder of the aluminum acts like a heatsink. The hot spots that exist on titanium during processing, which do not exist on aluminum during processing, make titanium much more susceptible to reacting with the air or even to starting a fire. Titanium, even as "commercially pure", has a much higher strength than aluminum, which requires higher forces for machining and increases even more the chances for overheating.
    - thaumasiotes 1y ago
      > Like with aluminum, this high reactivity is masked in finite products made of titanium, because any titanium object is covered by a protective layer of titanium dioxide. My understanding is that rust fails to protect iron the same way. Is that right? If so, why the difference?
      - bluGill 1y ago
        Rust can protect iron in that way, bluing is a common process to create a protective rust coating. However rust is fragile and often flakes off thus allowing the process to continue. Other metals their oxide is strong enough to protect the pure inner layers. This depends on the alloy involved as well. In general though rust is not a good iron protection.
      - mercurywells 1y ago
        Once rust starts, it is porous & flaky and allows more oxygen to infiltrate and hit the next layer of iron. The reason it is porous & flaky is due to creating a mix of FeO and Fe2O3 which have different crystal structures so it doesn't create a nice protective barrier.
      - kergonath 1y ago
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  Magnesium is similar. I used to have a magnesium campfire starter. It was a little ingot of magnesium, with a long flint, embedded along one side. You used your knife to shave some magnesium, then the flint, to set it ablaze. Worked a treat.
- avs733 1y ago
  There’s a significant history of government effort to improve working with titanium. Construction physics wrote a nice review [0]. The current level of workability and cost and alloying is after that chicken and egg. Titanium is expensive because it is hard to manufacture, not just hard to work with, which limits demand. Titanium, to what we now know, is what it is. It’s the nature of the material not a lack of investment. More realistically, the ROI isn’t there for most applications. Good aluminum is pretty darn good, massively easier to work, cheaper, etc. newer super steels have even made serious inroads on titanium parts because of workability and toughness. [0] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/the-story-of-titanium https://www.construction-physics.com/p/the-story-of-titanium
- nerdsniper 1y ago
  Titanium - Chlorine fires are even more magnificent than titanium-oxygen fires. Wet chlorine (>150ppm water) is too corrosive for ferrous metals and titanium is often used for pipes carrying wet chlorine. If something happens that ignites one of these pipelines there’s absolutely no way to put it out - it has the fuel (titanium) and oxidizer (chlorine) and burns mega-hot until one of them is fully consumed along the entire length of the pipeline. The pipelines can sometimes be shockingly long (1 mile-ish).
spankibalt 1y ago
> Titanium sucks to work with. Machinists hate it, equipment hates it, cutting tools hate it, and it makes shavings that can burn hot enough to go right through equipment and concrete floors. The safety and security implementation, including assorted regulations, certificates, processes, regulators and the like, is as neccessary as it's... vexing. :)
owenversteeg 1y ago
I agree with your comment in general, and that it is dangerous and abrasive and generally sucks to machine, but there are ways to get around that. For example you can make a lot of parts by stamping/forming/laser cutting fairly inexpensively. Sure, you'll still deal with titanium's quirks, but it's not a severe issue. For those parts the cost of the titanium is still typically the largest individual cost.
adrian_b 1y ago
Metallic titanium is already cheaper than copper, and the price ratio between copper and titanium will only increase. However, as you say, the processing costs from the raw metal to a finite product are much higher for titanium than for most cheap metals, mostly because of its low thermal conductivity (which makes titanium locally hot during processing) and its high reactivity with the atmosphere when hot, which is why the products made of titanium are expensive. It is unlikely that titanium will ever replace stainless steel in most of its applications, but wherever the lower density of titanium or its better resistance against certain chemicals give great enough advantages, I hope to see more titanium objects. I certainly like the titanium frame of my reading glasses, which is extremely thin and lightweight, almost invisible, while being much stronger and longer lived than a plastic frame would be.
- darig 1y ago
  [dead]
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  > and its high reactivity with the atmosphere when hot Isn't that a problem for everything? That's the nature of heat.
  - kergonath 1y ago
    That’s a matter of degree. Iron gets reactive and form some oxide at high temperature. This can be worked around by controlling the atmosphere or adding reducing elements or oxygen traps. Other metals like magnesium just burn, which is much harder to work around. You need to go much higher in temperature than the usual manufacturing conditions to make iron burn in a normal atmosphere.
  - SubjectToChange 1y ago
    Molten iron can be poured in open air. Doing that with titanium will yield a distinctly different results.
  - adrian_b 1y ago
    For metals with high electronegativity, like iron and copper, high temperatures do not necessarily create problems due to greater reactivity than at low temperatures. On the contrary, the oxides of such metals may decompose at high enough temperatures. Moreover, when such metals are mixed with more reactive metals, at high temperatures those will combine preferentially with non-metals like oxygen and sulfur, removing them from the metal of interest. For metals with high affinity to oxygen, like titanium, aluminum or magnesium, no temperatures attainable during normal processing are high enough to decompose their oxides, but the high temperatures increase by several orders of magnitude the speed of reaction with the air, in comparison with room temperature, where the speed of oxidation of titanium and aluminum becomes negligible immediately after the formation of a protective oxide layer. Moreover, for such metals it may be more difficult to find even more reactive metals than them, which will extract oxygen from their oxides while not having other undesirable properties, like yttrium was found for titanium in the parent article. Yttrium is a metal with a reactivity not so great as calcium, but greater than magnesium, so also greater than titanium and aluminum. Neither calcium nor magnesium are suitable for removing oxygen from titanium, for various reasons, e.g. low boiling or melting temperatures, so yttrium is likely to create much less problems. So the effects of heat are not always the same.
AngryData 1y ago
I could see cheaper titanium increasing its usage a good bit, only because we already avoid needing it whenever possible already. But overall I agree with you, titanium is significantly lighter than steel, but it isn't meaningfully stronger outside of special use cases, so the extra cost of manufacturing brings little to no value to 95% of steel usecases. Steel is just so easy to work with these days. And if something titanium breaks, its a full replacement of that cast or machined piece because you can't just weld it up with a simple portable welder, while steel can be repaired and modified near anywhere with dozens of relatively cheap and easy to use tools.
- Nopoint2 1y ago
  It isn't toxic, and that's an advantage that overrides any extra costs.
  - arethuza 1y ago
    It's also highly biocompatible so good for things like bone implants.
- ekaryotic 1y ago
  steel is great except for how easily it rusts. there are regions on the planet where a car shell is rotted out in 10 years. if a shell could be made from titanium you would have a long life vehicle, with environmental and economic savings.
  - bluGill 1y ago
    Citation needed. This depends very much on the alloy, but I would expect titanium cars would be forced scrapped after 200,000 miles (most of my cars reached 200k miles before they reached 10 years old) by law because fatigue builds up in normal use and the car is liable to break apart. Aluminum has the same issues and commercial trailers track how much the trailers are used and scrap them. Steel has the nice property that if you stay under certain stress limits fatigue doesn't built up over time and so you can keep using it as long as you care to (or until salt gets it).
dlahoda 1y ago
i have titanium: phone frame(with 7 years supports of insides), watch frame, watch brace, sushi sticks, forks, spoons, table knife, frying pans, pen, sunglasses frame, necklace. it is a lot titanium outthere in retail.
gadders 1y ago
Does this mean I won't get a cheap titanium suit of armour? Could me a game changer for HEMA.
- bluGill 1y ago
  You can get one if you are willing to pay for it. It means there is no reason to think that suit of armour will ever be cheap, and this advance while potentially lowering the costs won't lower it enough. Then again iron suits of armour are not cheap (though cheaper than titanium), and are mostly useless in the real world - but people have them. If you have the money I won't object you to getting one.
  - gadders 1y ago
    I often wonder how much we could improve on historic items like suits of armour using modern materials and manufacturing.
    - bluGill 1y ago
      Look at what the modern military uses. They face the same issues, even if bullets are somewhat different from arrows or swords, you still want to protect the same areas of the body again forces, and the same issues of weight, heat, maneuverability and such vs protection. While the exact compromise changes over time, any armorer in history will understand the compromises and why the modern military armour looks different. Which is to say I'd expect a modern suit of armour to be made of kevlar.
      - gadders 1y ago
        What I meant was, how much better would a modern version of medieval plate armour be if made from modern materials, vs armour made at the time for medieval combat.
- bell-cot 1y ago
  Yep, nope. BTW - might HEMA have any safety regs, for equipment that could become a Class D fire? There might be hazmat issues transporting such armour by air.
nimbius 1y ago
maybe like 40 years ago? ive never understood where this comes from...its sort of the same argument machinists in the seventies had when automotive companies were building components with 15% nickel hardening out of dedicated normalizing and heat treat furnaces. tool steel life died a bit, but it wasnt the end of the world. not anymore really. Kennametal and Sandvik all make insert tooling that will easily cut through Ti. Your multi-axis mills and CNC's will even track the tool wear for you and report when to replace. Titanium is no worse or better in your Haas than any other material in 2025. and if youre still having problems, EDM will absolutely slice through it like butter. nobody is working endmills or lathes with dry Ti and toolsteel in 2025. robots drown the piece in coolant and pick the right tools.
- jajko 1y ago
  Still sounds like tons of reasons to have high final cost, compared to cheaper metals.
  - adrian_b 1y ago
    How to machine titanium is well known now, but it requires more time and more energy than machining the same object from any other cheap metal. This is caused by fundamental properties of the metal, so it will not change in the future. Therefore machining titanium will always be more expensive than for steel or aluminum alloys or copper alloys. Making titanium objects by casting is seldom a possible choice, because that is also much more expensive than for any other cheap metal, due to high melting temperature and the requirement to use an inert atmosphere. Making titanium objects by plastic deformation is also expensive, because none of the titanium alloys has good ductility. The metals that are cheap to process by plastic deformation are those with a fcc crystal structure, like aluminum, copper and austenitic steel at room temperature, or like most steels at high temperature. The titanium alloys do not have such a crystal structure, so they cannot be deformed a lot without breaking. One of the few processing methods where the titanium alloys do not have properties that increase the processing cost in comparison with other metals in 3D printing. However 3D printing is a relatively expensive processing method for any metal.
aaron695 1y ago
[dead]
m463 1y ago
an apple titanium powerbook was pretty cool though EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_G4#Titanium_(2001-2002) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_G4#Titanium_(2001-20...
tecleandor 1y ago
I remember talking to a guy I shared an office with like 10 or 15 years ago. He did 3D modeling for jewelry and dentists (as separate gigs, not jewelry on teeth ;) ) and he had access to 3D print titanium with a laser sintering device in the dentist practice. What he told me is titanium is not expensive, but the problem is with the tooling. Expensive, hard to work with and energy intensive .
- anton-c 1y ago
  Yeah I make jewelry and have made some titanium chains by hand. Absolutely brutal to work with. And don't mess up! You need argon atmosphere to weld/solder it. It was cheaper than I thought to grab a chunk of 99.9 pure from McMaster but dang it's tough stuff. Tools hate it. It's gummy. Upshot is it can be anodized at home with stuff almost anyone has.
  - eth0up 1y ago
    How do carbide burrs do with hand machining titanium? They do great for me with aluminum and bronze. Never tried titanium or hardened steel.
    - anton-c 1y ago
      I've become limited by my process it seems cuz those never crossed my mind. With with amount of time shaping it normally takes id speculate it takes awhile. I have a decent sander and still make sure to cut away as much as possible cuz its gonna take another half hour to get it down if I'm a mm off.(just speaking off the cuff this makes me sound incredibly sloppy lol) That said, carbide pwns, and if you can secure the piece well there's no reason it wouldn't get it done eventually. The diamond and HSS tips have taken awhile on other things for me unlike what you report with the carbide. I'd love to find out I'm mistaken in my guess. I don't use a ton of steel but when I do I end up with hardened steel because i end up abrading instead of cutting haha. Might be better for normal stock, idk about already hardened. Ill just add you can create some wild finishes with the Dremel alternating anodizing, Dremel, polish, Dremel. Using the brush, the cutter, whatever to mess with the surface.

mjb 1y ago

Titanium fires sure are scary. But there's a good amount of chicken and egg here: expensive material limits demand, which limits progress on manufacturing techniques, which keeps part prices high. I would expect that significant manufacturing method progress would be made if there was a step change in the price of titanium stock. And I wouldn't overstate the machining difficulty. Sure, it's a pain in the rear, and expensive, but can be done on regular machines with the right tools, techniques, and processes. I've made a couple of titanium parts myself.

adastra22 1y ago
But there’s also the base chemistry: titanium doesn’t behave like steel, and the chemical differences are why it is such a pain to work with, not inexperience.
- adrian_b 1y ago
  The chemical difference between titanium and steel is mainly that titanium has a much higher reactivity with oxygen and nitrogen, the main constituents of air. Like with aluminum, this high reactivity is masked in finite products made of titanium, because any titanium object is covered by a protective layer of titanium dioxide. What is worse in titanium than in aluminum is that titanium has a low thermal conductivity, so a small part of the titanium can become very hot during processing, which does not happen with aluminum, where the remainder of the aluminum acts like a heatsink. The hot spots that exist on titanium during processing, which do not exist on aluminum during processing, make titanium much more susceptible to reacting with the air or even to starting a fire. Titanium, even as "commercially pure", has a much higher strength than aluminum, which requires higher forces for machining and increases even more the chances for overheating.
  - thaumasiotes 1y ago
    > Like with aluminum, this high reactivity is masked in finite products made of titanium, because any titanium object is covered by a protective layer of titanium dioxide. My understanding is that rust fails to protect iron the same way. Is that right? If so, why the difference?
    - bluGill 1y ago
      Rust can protect iron in that way, bluing is a common process to create a protective rust coating. However rust is fragile and often flakes off thus allowing the process to continue. Other metals their oxide is strong enough to protect the pure inner layers. This depends on the alloy involved as well. In general though rust is not a good iron protection.
    - mercurywells 1y ago
      Once rust starts, it is porous & flaky and allows more oxygen to infiltrate and hit the next layer of iron. The reason it is porous & flaky is due to creating a mix of FeO and Fe2O3 which have different crystal structures so it doesn't create a nice protective barrier.
    - kergonath 1y ago
ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
Magnesium is similar. I used to have a magnesium campfire starter. It was a little ingot of magnesium, with a long flint, embedded along one side. You used your knife to shave some magnesium, then the flint, to set it ablaze. Worked a treat.
avs733 1y ago
There’s a significant history of government effort to improve working with titanium. Construction physics wrote a nice review [0]. The current level of workability and cost and alloying is after that chicken and egg. Titanium is expensive because it is hard to manufacture, not just hard to work with, which limits demand. Titanium, to what we now know, is what it is. It’s the nature of the material not a lack of investment. More realistically, the ROI isn’t there for most applications. Good aluminum is pretty darn good, massively easier to work, cheaper, etc. newer super steels have even made serious inroads on titanium parts because of workability and toughness. [0] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/the-story-of-titanium https://www.construction-physics.com/p/the-story-of-titanium
nerdsniper 1y ago
Titanium - Chlorine fires are even more magnificent than titanium-oxygen fires. Wet chlorine (>150ppm water) is too corrosive for ferrous metals and titanium is often used for pipes carrying wet chlorine. If something happens that ignites one of these pipelines there’s absolutely no way to put it out - it has the fuel (titanium) and oxidizer (chlorine) and burns mega-hot until one of them is fully consumed along the entire length of the pipeline. The pipelines can sometimes be shockingly long (1 mile-ish).

spankibalt 1y ago

> Titanium sucks to work with. Machinists hate it, equipment hates it, cutting tools hate it, and it makes shavings that can burn hot enough to go right through equipment and concrete floors. The safety and security implementation, including assorted regulations, certificates, processes, regulators and the like, is as neccessary as it's... vexing. :)

owenversteeg 1y ago

I agree with your comment in general, and that it is dangerous and abrasive and generally sucks to machine, but there are ways to get around that. For example you can make a lot of parts by stamping/forming/laser cutting fairly inexpensively. Sure, you'll still deal with titanium's quirks, but it's not a severe issue. For those parts the cost of the titanium is still typically the largest individual cost.

adrian_b 1y ago

Metallic titanium is already cheaper than copper, and the price ratio between copper and titanium will only increase. However, as you say, the processing costs from the raw metal to a finite product are much higher for titanium than for most cheap metals, mostly because of its low thermal conductivity (which makes titanium locally hot during processing) and its high reactivity with the atmosphere when hot, which is why the products made of titanium are expensive. It is unlikely that titanium will ever replace stainless steel in most of its applications, but wherever the lower density of titanium or its better resistance against certain chemicals give great enough advantages, I hope to see more titanium objects. I certainly like the titanium frame of my reading glasses, which is extremely thin and lightweight, almost invisible, while being much stronger and longer lived than a plastic frame would be.

darig 1y ago
[dead]
thaumasiotes 1y ago
> and its high reactivity with the atmosphere when hot Isn't that a problem for everything? That's the nature of heat.
- kergonath 1y ago
  That’s a matter of degree. Iron gets reactive and form some oxide at high temperature. This can be worked around by controlling the atmosphere or adding reducing elements or oxygen traps. Other metals like magnesium just burn, which is much harder to work around. You need to go much higher in temperature than the usual manufacturing conditions to make iron burn in a normal atmosphere.
- SubjectToChange 1y ago
  Molten iron can be poured in open air. Doing that with titanium will yield a distinctly different results.
- adrian_b 1y ago
  For metals with high electronegativity, like iron and copper, high temperatures do not necessarily create problems due to greater reactivity than at low temperatures. On the contrary, the oxides of such metals may decompose at high enough temperatures. Moreover, when such metals are mixed with more reactive metals, at high temperatures those will combine preferentially with non-metals like oxygen and sulfur, removing them from the metal of interest. For metals with high affinity to oxygen, like titanium, aluminum or magnesium, no temperatures attainable during normal processing are high enough to decompose their oxides, but the high temperatures increase by several orders of magnitude the speed of reaction with the air, in comparison with room temperature, where the speed of oxidation of titanium and aluminum becomes negligible immediately after the formation of a protective oxide layer. Moreover, for such metals it may be more difficult to find even more reactive metals than them, which will extract oxygen from their oxides while not having other undesirable properties, like yttrium was found for titanium in the parent article. Yttrium is a metal with a reactivity not so great as calcium, but greater than magnesium, so also greater than titanium and aluminum. Neither calcium nor magnesium are suitable for removing oxygen from titanium, for various reasons, e.g. low boiling or melting temperatures, so yttrium is likely to create much less problems. So the effects of heat are not always the same.

AngryData 1y ago

I could see cheaper titanium increasing its usage a good bit, only because we already avoid needing it whenever possible already. But overall I agree with you, titanium is significantly lighter than steel, but it isn't meaningfully stronger outside of special use cases, so the extra cost of manufacturing brings little to no value to 95% of steel usecases. Steel is just so easy to work with these days. And if something titanium breaks, its a full replacement of that cast or machined piece because you can't just weld it up with a simple portable welder, while steel can be repaired and modified near anywhere with dozens of relatively cheap and easy to use tools.

Nopoint2 1y ago
It isn't toxic, and that's an advantage that overrides any extra costs.
- arethuza 1y ago
  It's also highly biocompatible so good for things like bone implants.
ekaryotic 1y ago
steel is great except for how easily it rusts. there are regions on the planet where a car shell is rotted out in 10 years. if a shell could be made from titanium you would have a long life vehicle, with environmental and economic savings.
- bluGill 1y ago
  Citation needed. This depends very much on the alloy, but I would expect titanium cars would be forced scrapped after 200,000 miles (most of my cars reached 200k miles before they reached 10 years old) by law because fatigue builds up in normal use and the car is liable to break apart. Aluminum has the same issues and commercial trailers track how much the trailers are used and scrap them. Steel has the nice property that if you stay under certain stress limits fatigue doesn't built up over time and so you can keep using it as long as you care to (or until salt gets it).

dlahoda 1y ago

i have titanium: phone frame(with 7 years supports of insides), watch frame, watch brace, sushi sticks, forks, spoons, table knife, frying pans, pen, sunglasses frame, necklace. it is a lot titanium outthere in retail.

gadders 1y ago

Does this mean I won't get a cheap titanium suit of armour? Could me a game changer for HEMA.

bluGill 1y ago
You can get one if you are willing to pay for it. It means there is no reason to think that suit of armour will ever be cheap, and this advance while potentially lowering the costs won't lower it enough. Then again iron suits of armour are not cheap (though cheaper than titanium), and are mostly useless in the real world - but people have them. If you have the money I won't object you to getting one.
- gadders 1y ago
  I often wonder how much we could improve on historic items like suits of armour using modern materials and manufacturing.
  - bluGill 1y ago
    Look at what the modern military uses. They face the same issues, even if bullets are somewhat different from arrows or swords, you still want to protect the same areas of the body again forces, and the same issues of weight, heat, maneuverability and such vs protection. While the exact compromise changes over time, any armorer in history will understand the compromises and why the modern military armour looks different. Which is to say I'd expect a modern suit of armour to be made of kevlar.
    - gadders 1y ago
      What I meant was, how much better would a modern version of medieval plate armour be if made from modern materials, vs armour made at the time for medieval combat.
bell-cot 1y ago
Yep, nope. BTW - might HEMA have any safety regs, for equipment that could become a Class D fire? There might be hazmat issues transporting such armour by air.

nimbius 1y ago

maybe like 40 years ago? ive never understood where this comes from...its sort of the same argument machinists in the seventies had when automotive companies were building components with 15% nickel hardening out of dedicated normalizing and heat treat furnaces. tool steel life died a bit, but it wasnt the end of the world. not anymore really. Kennametal and Sandvik all make insert tooling that will easily cut through Ti. Your multi-axis mills and CNC's will even track the tool wear for you and report when to replace. Titanium is no worse or better in your Haas than any other material in 2025. and if youre still having problems, EDM will absolutely slice through it like butter. nobody is working endmills or lathes with dry Ti and toolsteel in 2025. robots drown the piece in coolant and pick the right tools.

jajko 1y ago
Still sounds like tons of reasons to have high final cost, compared to cheaper metals.
- adrian_b 1y ago
  How to machine titanium is well known now, but it requires more time and more energy than machining the same object from any other cheap metal. This is caused by fundamental properties of the metal, so it will not change in the future. Therefore machining titanium will always be more expensive than for steel or aluminum alloys or copper alloys. Making titanium objects by casting is seldom a possible choice, because that is also much more expensive than for any other cheap metal, due to high melting temperature and the requirement to use an inert atmosphere. Making titanium objects by plastic deformation is also expensive, because none of the titanium alloys has good ductility. The metals that are cheap to process by plastic deformation are those with a fcc crystal structure, like aluminum, copper and austenitic steel at room temperature, or like most steels at high temperature. The titanium alloys do not have such a crystal structure, so they cannot be deformed a lot without breaking. One of the few processing methods where the titanium alloys do not have properties that increase the processing cost in comparison with other metals in 3D printing. However 3D printing is a relatively expensive processing method for any metal.

aaron695 1y ago

[dead]

m463 1y ago

an apple titanium powerbook was pretty cool though EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_G4#Titanium_(2001-2002) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_G4#Titanium_(2001-20...

tecleandor 1y ago

I remember talking to a guy I shared an office with like 10 or 15 years ago. He did 3D modeling for jewelry and dentists (as separate gigs, not jewelry on teeth ;) ) and he had access to 3D print titanium with a laser sintering device in the dentist practice. What he told me is titanium is not expensive, but the problem is with the tooling. Expensive, hard to work with and energy intensive .

anton-c 1y ago
Yeah I make jewelry and have made some titanium chains by hand. Absolutely brutal to work with. And don't mess up! You need argon atmosphere to weld/solder it. It was cheaper than I thought to grab a chunk of 99.9 pure from McMaster but dang it's tough stuff. Tools hate it. It's gummy. Upshot is it can be anodized at home with stuff almost anyone has.
- eth0up 1y ago
  How do carbide burrs do with hand machining titanium? They do great for me with aluminum and bronze. Never tried titanium or hardened steel.
  - anton-c 1y ago
    I've become limited by my process it seems cuz those never crossed my mind. With with amount of time shaping it normally takes id speculate it takes awhile. I have a decent sander and still make sure to cut away as much as possible cuz its gonna take another half hour to get it down if I'm a mm off.(just speaking off the cuff this makes me sound incredibly sloppy lol) That said, carbide pwns, and if you can secure the piece well there's no reason it wouldn't get it done eventually. The diamond and HSS tips have taken awhile on other things for me unlike what you report with the carbide. I'd love to find out I'm mistaken in my guess. I don't use a ton of steel but when I do I end up with hardened steel because i end up abrading instead of cutting haha. Might be better for normal stock, idk about already hardened. Ill just add you can create some wild finishes with the Dremel alternating anodizing, Dremel, polish, Dremel. Using the brush, the cutter, whatever to mess with the surface.