working with titanium ??
 

How is titanium to work on?
Easy to drill? Cut threads? On a lathe?
Special tools required?

Anybody some experience on this?

Thank you in advanve.
DAF

titanium itself is rather a soft metal, it can catch fire while machining. When in a alloy, the alloy becomes very strong, and hard to cut, difficult to work with. The alloy 6AL-4V is very common I used to have many parts machined with this alloy and it took several months to perfect our run times, speed and tooling, nice stuff, just not for every one to work with

Diamond tipped tools are a must with titanium alloys, tungsten carbide will last no time at all. I think you will also struggle to drill through it with normal drill bits (High speed steel). Don't know much else about it, but my school workshop don't manufacture anything out of titanium, cos its too tough.

Titanium is a PITA to work on..

I've got some titanium rods, but it's so darn tough.. with a simple rasp, it's almost impossible to get some off. you need a high speed dremel to machine it a bit.

You need a drill press to make holes in it, it's a disaster, no wonder titanium parts are that expensive

Titanium really isn't needed in a RC application high quality aluminum is strong enough and much cheaper and easier to work with. Titan parts are more for bling factor We have had as many failures with titanium components as with aluminum and the weight factor is not much different.

for skids titanium is superior to aluminum.

titanium is not for the bling, it's more about the strength. what makes you say that aluminium and titanium weight/strength factor is about the same?

They are pretty similar. Aluminium is about half the weight of titanium, and 7000 series aluminium alloys are pretty strong. Titanium is better for skids (as you said), its much much harder and can absorb impacts. Aluminium is better for structural parts (bulkheads) as its much lighter.

Ti skids - Now that i would be interested in - I found a local guy that says he has a friend that is in joint replacement and has a bunch of titanium that i could get - Now if i could figure out how to incorporate or transforn a titanium knuckle used for human beings into a knuckle for my Gmaxx - id be all set...:027:

What parts do you have in mind exactly?
Serum is right, ti is a PITA to work with. I needed to remove some material from my hardcore revo skid, for my center diff spur, and it was very difficult to drill/dremel etc. I was able to do it with regular drill bits but it was definetly a PITA to only remove just a little bit of material. :026:

Having had componentry manufactured in both 7000 series aluminum and 6AL-4V the strength is very similiar in smaller parts our engineers never understood why we had to have our components fabricated in Titan, except for the fact that the general public liked the thought that it was somehow far superior, and it is superior in many aspects. It is a personal choice myself I wouldn't try and manufacture my own custom parts with it.

High tech engineering;

who said titanium was hard to work with.. it just takes the appropriate tools.. lol

http://www.stepinsidedesign.com/asse...cons/13164.jpg

Titanium skids is one of my best buys for the E-Maxx, amazing. The problem with Titanium though, if you do manage to bend it (very unlikely) it won't go back!

Ti. is almost like a memory material. If you don't heat it up and bend it, it will almost bend back.

I bend titanium hinge pins all the time. So I changed back to stainless steel, and havn't had a problem since.

does ti scratch up easilY?