so how many of you knew i had a small portion of Titanium on my uni? well i dont anymore and im very sad…i dont know how i will go on without this magic metal,this is like Sampson lossing his hair
over a year ago SH sent me this to test,it was working great the whole time untill just yesterday when grabbing the handle to hop i felt a flex that wasnt there before,then a popping noise came soon after.
my riding has been very light and i havent even gone on a “big” ride since the Cali-muni-week-end so i’ll will chalk this up as another part of broken equipment caused from that week-end.if i did the Downiville ride,im sure it would have broken on the trail,that would have been fun eh?
(for those scoring at home) the Wilder rail Adapter i broke,broke in the back.this Ti one broke in the front…
in this attached photo i put a silver dollar in the open gap where the broken rail was just for refferance
The difficulty with welding Ti is that if there is any O2 around when the weld is done, it combines with the Ti to form titanium dioxide which is pretty much like sand. This “sand” is very weak and not what you want in your welds. So you have to have a special setup that immerses the weld in an inert gas, typically argon, while welding. Tricky stuff, but good.
Jagur, don’t despair. I have broken so many seat post parts over the years it isn’t funny. It’s usually aluminum stuff that breaks on me, more than half the time on a weld. Your bracket has to be just about one of a kind which means it’s a prototype - they always break!
oh im not in any despair really,i was being sarcastic about not knowing how to go on without Ti in my life.
a year ago when Steve sent me this thing he also sent a CrMo version as a back up.So its time to move on to another Proto…im going to mount a brake to my uni soon and like the Ti one,the CrMo version doesnt have a lever brake mount.i’ll either have to figure out another way to mount it or get another Wilder rail thing which im sketchy about since i’ve broken one of those too.
A titanium rail adapter is really a pretty dumb idea. The amount of weight that’s saved is minimal since the part is small anyway … as well as making the thing more difficult to fabricate.
But I frequently do dumb things so I made two Ti rail adapters … I have one that hasn’t broken and Jagur has the other. Actually I’m surprised that Jagur’s rail adapter has held up this long because I don’t have an ideal setup for welding Ti and I don’t really know what I’m doing anyway!
Jagur - Send me the busted adapter and I’ll re-weld it. Let’s see if we can get another year out of it.
Steve Howard
p.s. - Jagur’s other rail adapter is stainless steel, not CrMo. It’s an early version of the Kinport rail adapter.
You make this sound much more complicated than it really is. Any good TIG or even MIG (with the right wire feed, of course) machine will do that. The hard part is the skill at TIG welding you need in order to get the metal to act correctly. Also, you need titanium filler rod, which I imagine is rather pricey.
