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Titanium.

N

NKDietrich

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Jul 25, 2004
Messages
5,442
Does anyone know what the price is for sheets of titanium, and what kind of tools are reqired to machine it? My metal shop buddy spends most of his time getting drunk and living in a scrapyard now or i'd just ask him.
 
"expensive" and "stuff I don't have" - but I imagine you already knew that. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable can be more helpful, too.
 
Uhm. Yeah, expensive is a fair description. Start thinking on the order of $20 a square foot for 1mm stuff. GTAW for the welding if desired. Workable like any other normal metal, but be careful with your waste, because titanium dust is flammable.
 
Ok, first i was just reading, but then, curiosity got me...may i ask what you considering building out of titanium?
 
jaegertech said:
Uhm. Yeah, expensive is a fair description. Start thinking on the order of $20 a square foot for 1mm stuff. GTAW for the welding if desired. Workable like any other normal metal, but be careful with your waste, because titanium dust is flammable.
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Extremely flammable,and damn hard to put out once it gets going.Throw water on it,and you end up with an even bigger fire.
 
Let's not get carried away - titianium's flammability is comparable to aluminum and I don't hear scare stories about making aluminum computer cases/parts.

Onlinemetals.com has 1/16" sheet at $165 per square foot. Google could have answered this question.
 
I would imagine normal metal cutting and milling tools will do the job, but they will wear out a heck of a lot faster since it's one of the toughest metals out there (I think tungsten is tougher though).
 
Don't bother with Tit, I bought a scrapped Lincoln Mark 8 hood that is aluminum and am going to proceed to build a case out of that. Hood cost me $20.
 
Titanium is very, very expensive, especially when you buy small quantities from a store or online. Go with something cheaper, like aluminum.
 
Michael Daly said:
Let's not get carried away - titianium's flammability is comparable to aluminum and I don't hear scare stories about making aluminum computer cases/parts.

Onlinemetals.com has 1/16" sheet at $165 per square foot. Google could have answered this question.
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I've seen the results of titanium's flammability firsthand many times,believe me,aluminum doesn't compare to it.On a small scale like making computer case parts there isn't too much concern,if you know what to do if it does start burning.But in manufacturing it,the results can be catastrophic.
 
lol, good luck with machining it. Better hope your buddy's machine shop is capable of cutting/drilling that type metal. I brought some titanium stock home from work and gave some to my brother to use for a project in metal shop at high school, and it ended up just chewing the teeth off all their saw blades and dulled their drill bits, barely even scratching the titanium. :p The stuff I had was a super hard titanium alloy.. but still. You'll need a good metal shop with diamond cutting edges to work with it.
 
michael.pa2 said:
I've seen the results of titanium's flammability firsthand many times,believe me,aluminum doesn't compare to it.On a small scale like making computer case parts there isn't too much concern,if you know what to do if it does start burning.But in manufacturing it,the results can be catastrophic.
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pretty much. not only is titanium expensive, but class D fire extinguishers start at about $500. i personally wouldn't work with even a mildly flamable metal without one (but then, i value my life and my stuff, so others' mileage may vary).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanium#Precautions
knowledge is a beautiful thing.

PS: thermite is also a beautiful thing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrCWLpRc1yM (who said aluminium wasn't dangerous?)
 
dystopic said:
pretty much. not only is titanium expensive, but class D fire extinguishers start at about $500. i personally wouldn't work with even a mildly flamable metal without one (but then, i value my life and my stuff, so others' mileage may vary).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanium#Precautions
knowledge is a beautiful thing.

PS: thermite is also a beautiful thing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrCWLpRc1yM (who said aluminium wasn't dangerous?)
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Get your recipes correct... ;)
Thermite is a mixture of Iron filings and Aluminum powder and is generally ignited by a magnesium wick and magnesium powder cap over the top of the thermite mixture to generate the heat required to set off the thermite. We use it to weld cracks in extremely large steel castings. Makes a pretty fire! Lots of sparks!

Titanium chips you can lite off with a BIC disposable lighter and I've seen it melt down an Engine Lathe. 15" throw X 6 ft bed. And yeah, water will make it worse because the Titanium burns hot enough to separate the hydrogen from the oxygen in the water and then burn the hydrogen and use the o2 to supercharge it's own flame.

Tungsten is not much harder than Titanium, a little softer than tool steel in fact. It's used as a binder to create Tungsten-Carbide tooling. The Carbide is the actual cutting agent and the tungsten is used because it is considered a refractory metal (High Temperature) it is also used to make light bulb elements and is the electrode for TIG or GTAW welding. It's also like the cheapest of the refractory metals... platinum is in this group too just to give you an idea how expensive refractory metals are.

Titanium's machinability is only a little worse than Aluminum. What makes it very diffucult to work with is it will work-harden very quickly. Then it's almost impossible to cut. So you have to take a good depth of cut and keep it. If you slack off then it will work harden and your tool will just wear itself out rubbing in the same spot. That's probably what happened to that shop classes saws. Most people don't want to take a big cut, especially when using manual machine tools. Titanium requires you to take a big cut and then "let 'er eat!"

I think that I'd hate drilling thin Titanium sheet. You'd have to have a lot of pressure on the drill to cut fast enough and breakthrough will cause the sheet to climb up the drill bit and spin around doing it's imitation of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, if it didn't just break the drill bit. Then you'd get the problem of standard drill bits don't make round holes in thin material - they tend to be 3 sided. And sheet metal bits are very fragile at the tip - hard to sharpen too.
An endmill of the correct size, firmly clamping the stock, and using a large bed vertical milling machine would do it. Might have to clamp it between 2 sheets of sacrificial aluminum stock to get a good machinable thickness of material, though.

It'd be cheaper and faster to just buy the stock and send it to a shop that has a Laser or water-jet machine.

And I hope that you aren't wanting to put any fancy bends into it. Titanium really doesn't like that! It has a tendency to un-bend when it want's too. That's why a lot of eye glass frames are made of titanium.


It's amazing what you pick up as an Aerospace Engineer, isn't it?
 
Thermite can also melt Terminator skeletons too. So have some in hand for future use.
 
Thermite is a mixture of Iron filings and Aluminum powder and is generally ignited by a magnesium wick and magnesium powder cap over the top of the thermite mixture to generate the heat required to set off the thermite. We use it to weld cracks in extremely large steel castings. Makes a pretty fire! Lots of sparks!
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Iron II oxide and aluminum filings/powder... right? Regular iron wouldn't do shit, unless it was in a high oxygen environment (in which case, no iron would be needed in the first place :p)
 
Arcygenical said:
Iron II oxide and aluminum filings/powder... right? Regular iron wouldn't do shit, unless it was in a high oxygen environment (in which case, no iron would be needed in the first place :p)
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Here is more info http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermite

We use a lot more iron than normal because we want a molten iron run off to fill in the cracks in these large castings and the government's thermite grenades have quite a bit more than the normal amount also. They are generally used to destroy equipment and file cabinets, etc.

At one time a guy on Ebay was selling thermite by the pound - premixed.
I hope that they shut him down!
 
rodsfree said:
Here is more info http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermite

We use a lot more iron than normal because we want a molten iron run off to fill in the cracks in these large castings and the government's thermite grenades have quite a bit more than the normal amount also. They are generally used to destroy equipment and file cabinets, etc.

At one time a guy on Ebay was selling thermite by the pound - premixed.
I hope that they shut him down!
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nah, i bought out his stock for future protection against the aforementioned terminator skeletons.
 
rodsfree said:
Get your recipes correct... ;)
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not sure how they were incorrect... unless you thought i was suggesting that thermite contains titanium, which wasn't my intent. i only brought thermite up because someone before me said aluminium wasn't dangerous--which is normally true for the most part, AFAIK. but watching thermite videos is fun, in any case.
 
dystopic said:
not sure how they were incorrect... unless you thought i was suggesting that thermite contains titanium, which wasn't my intent. i only brought thermite up because someone before me said aluminium wasn't dangerous--which is normally true for the most part, AFAIK. but watching thermite videos is fun, in any case.
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I meant that aluminum "by itself isn't very flammable" unlike titanium. You have to mix aluminum with other stuff to create thermite - thus recipe. Titanium chips can be lite like a cigarette, with a match. Which could be helpful if you needed to start a fire - or something else. ;)
 
^ ah, yes, and you're of course correct. in any event, fire and chemistry are fun (and this is coming from a sociologist by training).
 
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