Luyện nói tiếng Anh bằng Shadowing qua video: Everything You Didn’t Know About Titanium Bikes

Titanium is a material that many people regard as the best.

But what actually is titanium?

How does it differ from other materials?

And why the hell would you make a bike from it?

To find out more, I'm going to go speak to an expert.

Titanium bikes do feel smoother.

The cost is always high.

What you're really paying for is energy.

Higher density than aluminum, a lower density than steel, higher stiffness than aluminum, lower stiffness than steel.

They last significantly longer, but it's not very strong.

Tom Sturdy is the man behind Sturdy Cycles

and has been making custom titanium bikes since 2014 using a

combination of titanium tubes as well as 3D printed sections and components.

Tom has got qualifications in aerospace engineering and sports biomechanics, which in my mind makes him the perfect person to help answer my questions.

Let's start right the beginning and find out what titanium actually is.

Titanium is an element, it's number 22 on the periodic table.

When you're talking about it being used in bikes, it's very rare that it would be used in its pure form.

You can use pure titanium metal for various things, but more often than not,

when it's used to make something like a bike or anything structural, it will be alloyed with some other elements.

Normally, aluminum and vanadium in different quantities.

To try to change the properties of it.

Why would you not use titanium just by itself?

Pure titanium, and it can be a bit confusing

because a lot of these alloys will have lots of different names and they're all very similar.

It can be confusing.

Pure titanium, titanium, it's got lots of useful characteristics of titanium,

so it doesn't corrode very, very, very slowly.

Essentially, it's corrosion resistant, but it's not very strong.

It'll bend quite easily and fatigue quite easily as well.

In terms of trying to make a bike from titanium, how are we going about doing it?

Is it in tube form?

Is it shaped and then welded together? like give us an explainer on that.

Yeah, so probably the main downside of titanium is

that it's difficult to work with and that kind of means sort of in all different ways of working with metal.

So it's very difficult to change its shape and

that typically is one of the challenges with it

but it will normally be used in tube form

so this is a drawn tube

and then yeah tubes will be cut to length butted up once again against one another

and welded together you can also change its shape in other ways

so yeah for making bikes sometimes it might be cast

or 3d printed and you can get different shapes from it that way.

You can also machine it.

Typically, the alloy that you would use for tubing would be different to the alloy

that you might use for a machined part.

This is like a machined part.

This is a chainring.

You've made this in -house.

This, explain to us how the hell we go from something that looks like this to something that looks like this.

Yes.

This is, that's a raw stock.

Well, it's come out of a big bar and they cut a little slice off it.

So this is a grade of titanium that is better suited to machining.

It's quite high strength, but it'd be very difficult to make tubes from this grade of titanium.

It can be done and some companies do it, but it comes with challenges with the material becoming brittle and that sort of thing.

This is well suited to machining.

In this case, we'll hold this in a CNC machine and gradually remove material until we're left with that.

I guess that's the same principle as what you have with other materials, that there's slightly different versions of it which are tweaked to suit the application.

In terms of looking at that titanium tube, how does something like that compare in its properties compared to like a steel tube or an aluminum tube?

What are the differences, especially if we looked at like for like profiles and shapes?

Yes.

Titanium is, it sits sort of, if we're thinking about the materials that you build bikes from,

titanium sits nicely in the middle in terms of its mechanical properties.

If you were to have the exact same tube and it were made out of aluminium.

The aluminium one would be lighter than this one.

But it'd be very rare that you'd have an aluminium tube with

that thickness because aluminium wouldn't be strong enough in that thickness.

So an aluminium tube would have to be thicker to be stronger?

Thicker, so the actual weight difference

when you are using it in a practical sense would be

less than the theoretical difference in terms of just the density but yeah

so titanium is is has a higher density than than aluminium

a lower density than steel higher stiffness than aluminium lower stiffness than steel strength will vary depending on the alloy

so it sits kind of nicely in the middle of the range of mechanical properties certainly for metals

that would be used to make bikes and

so you can use it to then design and make quite a broad range of types of bike.

You can make stiff bikes, flexible bikes, that sort of thing.

Quite fit in the balance of what you want to achieve.

In terms of looking at overall bikes built up ready to go, what are some of the reasons why somebody might want to

consider maybe a titanium bike over an aluminum one or a steel one or maybe even a carbon one?

There are lots of different considerations.

I think, generally speaking, certainly in the bike industry, different materials tend to have these different assumptions made about it.

So people will often assume that a carbon bike

rides in a particular way or performs in a particular way and the same is true of aluminium, titanium, steel.

So titanium is famously quite comfortable.

It's not really as simple as saying that because you've made a bike out of titanium it will be comfortable.

It'd be very easy to make an uncomfortable titanium bike.

Generally speaking, it will have these kind of sweet spots.

Because of the inherent properties of titanium, and then when you start to make it into a bike, it can tend to produce bikes that are quite comfortable.

There are other reasons.

It's essentially corrosion resistant, so it's not going to rust like a steel bike.

It's not going to easy to look after in the sense that because it doesn't corrode,

you don't need to paint it, so you don't have to worry about scratching paint, that type of thing.

You can ride it all year round, you don't have to worry about riding it.

What about in terms of robustness, actually?

Because when people talk about carbon fiber frames, one thing they say is, oh, you've got to be careful with it.

You don't want to bang it in the wrong ways or it's only strong in certain directions.

How would titanium compare in that sense?

So titanium is, I mean, it's inherently probably more robust in some ways than a composite just

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because it's a metal and metals are homogeneous so they've kind of got equal strength in all directions.

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So yeah, it's not like a carbon tube that if you crushed it in the wrong way you might damage it.

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You could dent titanium if you hit it hard enough, but it's relatively difficult to do that.

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It's quite tough, but every material has its limit.

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Generally speaking, titanium has got a really good fatigue life and it is very strong for its weight.

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Actually in absolute terms, it's very strong as well.

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It is generally pretty robust, but there's no such thing as something that's - It's not indestructible, is it?

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I'm sorry that people often say when you're talking about entertaining bikes, it's like, oh, there's that like entertaining buzz that you get.

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Is that a thing and what on earth, how would you explain that to someone that wouldn't know what to expect?

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It is to a certain extent, yes.

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The material property is quite a, for want of a better word, it's quite a springy material.

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It does tend to respond slightly differently to,

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for example, the vibrations that you get from riding over a road, that road buzz.

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That high -frequency stuff.

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Yes, it will respond differently to other materials just because it has underlying properties.

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I think as a general rule, titanium bikes do feel smoother to ride than other materials, but it's a little bit,

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it'd be oversimplifying it to say that any titanium bike will because you can't.

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It all comes down to the quality of the build, I guess.

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Yes.

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In terms of pricing, when you look at, I think, titanium bikes, I think it's fair to say typically you could say you

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see far more custom titanium bikes than what you do in other materials,

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but how would you rank a titanium bike and as a material in terms of price compared to other materials?

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Yes.

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It's pretty much the main downside of the material from a consumer point of view is

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that the cost is always high

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so titanium as a as an element is actually quite abundant there's a lot of it on earth

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but it is very difficult to get it from its kind of raw or form into a useful

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material and basically what you're really paying for is energy

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and energy costs perpetually get higher right

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and they're never really going to go down

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so titanium will always be a relatively expensive metal from

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that point of view and and it because it's difficult to work with

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so for example machining the chainring that yeah yeah

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if you were machining the exact same shape out of aluminium it would take a fraction of the time

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because it's quite difficult to work with titanium and keep it in the right condition.

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The problem really is that titanium bikes will always end up being more expensive

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and that's why it tends to be used not at the lower end of the market.

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Yes, it does tend to be at the high end custom type bike.

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Yes, that's interesting.

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Also, there is an additional way of starting to look at working with titanium, which is something that you are a big fan of.

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Tell us more about something like this 3D printed lever.

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3D printing is increasingly a common way of working with metals.

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Aluminium, titanium, steel can all be printed.

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One of the good things about it is that because titanium is very difficult to get into a particular shape.

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3D printing is a great way that you can achieve that.

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Of course, there are strengths and weaknesses of using additive manufacturing full stop,

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but it's a great way that you can get the raw material into a shape that you want for some design application.

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Or an intricate part like that.

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Exactly.

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We use it a lot to get a particular design intent from a performance point of view,

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an aesthetic point of view.

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We use it a lot in conjunction with, for example, machining.

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Rather than starting out with a big block and removing a lot of material.

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A lot of material.

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When you compare this, it's crazy, isn't it?

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Yeah, so additive manufacturing can be a really useful way of,

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you know, you could print something that is nearly the shape you need and then machine the rest of it away.

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And you could do that with casting as well.

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There's different strength benefits one way or the other.

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And of course, in a sense, for me, for my application where every bike we make is different and custom,

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3D printing has an obvious advantage because you don't have to pay for tooling costs of a cast part.

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That's a really interesting point there.

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That's covered off loads of really important and useful information about titanium.

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One key question I do want to ask you is,

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do you think we're ever going to see titanium bikes and parts start to become more mainstream and more commonplace,

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or do you think it's going to stay as that not quite elusive material, material, but a bit more of a niche material rather than something that's mainstream?

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I think it will come down.

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Cost is probably the main factor to consider there because it's so expensive as a raw material, it's difficult to work with or certainly slow to work with.

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All of those things, the costs

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that are added to the already high cost of the raw material are ones that are difficult to reduce.

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I don't see an easy way that they would come down.

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There is more automation that gets built into processes like additive manufacturing and machining as well.

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But I think the main problem with it being used on a widespread level is,

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yeah, it's just going to come down to the fact that cost and as we're seeing at the moment,

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one of the big problems with bikes is that there aren't many at the low end of the market.

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Yes, it certainly doesn't feel like a material that's going to lend itself to the budget end of the scale

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or as an entry point into cycling.

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I guess, like you said, if the cost of the raw material is already high, even in the future with whatever technology and process are developed,

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if you're able to reduce the processing costs afterwards, you're already at a higher starting point, so it's always going to be difficult.

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Yes, exactly.

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That piece of titanium that makes that chain ring, just buying

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that bit of material is already multiple times what it would cost me to buy an already finished aluminum chain ring.

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I guess there is potentially the argument on the flip side of that, is that whilst the chain is more expensive in the initial outlay,

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it could last an aluminum part over multiple times again.

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Yes.

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That's one of the reasons that, for example, that's one of the reasons that we make those chainrings is that they last significantly longer.

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So over the kind of service life of the part, probably.

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works out about the same if not a bit cheaper depending on how you want to do that.

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That's actually a really good point.

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Titanium is going to be a high price, it's unlikely to ever change, but one of the big advantages are its strength,

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robustness, and the chance that it could outlive and outperform other different materials many times.

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Yes, certainly.

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Again, the bikes that we make here, they're all intended as lifetime bikes.

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I'm expecting that those bikes will be in existence for as long as their owner wants to ride a bike.

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That's certainly something that you wouldn't perhaps say of other materials that inherently just won't have such a long service life.

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For me, that's one of the key draws and advantages for titanium.

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I think that's what also draw other people to it as a choice material.

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I think we've covered off pretty much everything that I could think about talking about.

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Tom, thanks very much for your time.

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It's all right.

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No problem.

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Hopefully, you found this video interesting and informative.

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I certainly know I enjoyed speaking to Tom.

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For me, a titanium bike is one which I wish to own, but unfortunately, it still seems to be a little bit out of my price brackets.

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Remember, for all things bike and bike tech related, subscribe to GCN Tech because it also helps support what we do.

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See you later.

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