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Yeah, I can imagine. The problem with titanium tubing is that almost all of it is designed for aircraft hydraulic and fuel lines, which happily is pretty close to what you’d want to use for a diamond frame bicycle. It’s when you start going outside of the usual diameters and gauges that it’s a problem, because getting ti tubing drawn to your own spec is very spendy indeed. I’m an ex-licensed aircraft engineer and I’ve never seen a gauge of ti tubing like that of a Brompton main tube in any commercial aircraft. Military maybe, but that’s not my field.
The Brompton main tube is pretty thick gauge stuff and to equate that in ti would take some proper stress analysis work. Ti is strong but relatively stiff and brittle compared to steel. If it’s Brompton doing it then you’d hope they’ve done it properly.
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jj72
If it's a Brompton project then hopefully they've redesigned it for Ti. Over on the CTC forums there was the tale of someone who'd spent £lots on what was basically a Ti pattern parts build, only to be disappointed once it became clear that just replicating the tube dimensions made it very noodly.