Seems that at the time various companies were trying to trying to make just about every bike component from titanium. Some of them make sense, rims did not. I hesitate to mention engineering professors after the recent rotational inertia thread, but I remember one of my profs commenting that if steel were suddenly invented today, it would be hailed as a high-tech wonder material. Alloy steel really is pretty remarkable stuff, although aluminum and titanium have displaced steel in a lot of components in bikes and elsewhere since the 50's. Seems people always look for places to use the latest materials, with the sensible applications enduring and the others like titanium rims becoming collectors items. I think the ultimate dumb idea in materials for bikes, and therefore maybe the ultimate collectors item, would be the Original All-Plastic Bike someone tried to push in the 70's. This was evidently mostly a scam to bilk investors, but someone on the list, I think maybe it was Sheldon, confirmed that at least one was made as he saw it up close at a bike trade show. It would be really neat to have that baby, though it was probably totally unrideable. BTW speaking of other materials replacing steel, how many old steel crankarms ever broke? I'll bet steel crank failures were a lot rarer than the alloy crank failures like the ones on the web site someone posted a link to. If steel were invented today, its manufacturers might try to lobby the CPSC to outlaw those "dangerous" alloy cranks in favor of "safe" steel ones.
Regards,
Jerry "former member of the United Steelworkers union (many years ago)" Moos
-----Original Message----- From: Brandon Ives [mailto:monkey37@bluemarble.net] Sent: Monday, April 23, 2001 1:30 PM To: Aldo Ross Cc: Classicrendezvous@bikelist.org Subject: Re: [CR]Titanium rims on eBay
I had a pair as wheels in @'91 and they were really soft. You could actually feel it while riding and cornering hard and they were built up really tight. Not all that light that I remember, but really cool. The pair I had dented really easily. Rims really aren't a great application for Titanium since the ratio of stiffness, stength, and weight aren't better than aluminum in this application. Let's just say that if they were better than aluminum you'd see more Ti rims. Please let's not turn this into a technical argument. Anyway, these would be a good idea for a show bike, but I wouldn't put a lot of miles on them. With that said if the price doesn't go too high I may bid on them since I'm a real retro-techno-wheenie and things like this make me drool. enjoy, Brandon"monkeyman"Ives "Nobody can do everything, but if everybody did something everything would get done." Gil Scott-Heron
On Mon, 23 Apr 2001, Aldo Ross wrote:
> Here's something I don't remember seeing before - Araya Titanium rims:
>
> http://ebay.com/
>
> Anyone have experience with these?
>
> Aldo Ross