Fully 3D Printed Ti frame - what’s the impact here?
 

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I’m curious how these bikes ride from a material perspective, are the more comparable to carbon layup bikes vs round tube ti bikes? Is this something that could drastically change the metal bike marketplace?

3d printing in general is a great way to create things outside the boundaries of traditional bike tubing.

It's also a great way to build prototypes - it's so easy to change shapes, print again, and see how the new thing fits or feels.

Strength of 3d printed titanium is quite good too.

Its downside is the cost to produce, especially at high quantity. There are usually cheaper and faster ways to build in quantity.

I suspect 3d printed titanium will be used only on boutique, low volume frames for a long time.

Yang Yang says:

ok but does Yang Yang have to shout?

Now this is weird.

3d printing is great for small production runs. In large scale production, there is almost always a cheaper way to build - like investing in hydroform tooling, or using castings, etc.

Chinese companies usually live by large scale production.

I don't see how this adds up.

3d printing short, limited runs saves on the tooling and molds that would otherwise make up for speed/delivery on mass produced numbers

3D printing, great for concepts, prototypes, and one off works. Then use the models you have to make the molds for mass produced products rather than investing hand over fist for tooling and molds up front.

Overall, it really expedites the first few iteration turn around process.

I think it will also be used for high precision components al la No22. 3d printing the dropouts significantly increases the accuracy of the brake mounts and decreases skilled labor of a welder purging and welding the same.

1.5 KG is 20% heavier than welded using some 3D printed parts. Tubing is lighter than 3D printed tubing. I also wonder once the material is heat treated after printing whether it will be as straight as a welded and aligned frame

I was in a manufacturing facility of one of the larger aerospace manufacturers about a year ago. They were using 3d printed titanium hydraulic manifold for one of the military applications. The life of the parts were exceeding the machined pieces by 2x and were easier for them to produce. Additive manufacturing is in its infancy and industry is still figuring out how to apply it in most cases. It will change the way things are done sooner rather than later.

Theoretically because you can print scaffolds and armatures within tunes you could make thinner, lighter, and stronger parts. If you’ve ever 3d printed anything though, it takes forever. It’s more like a dot matrix printer than a laserjet or offset press. There may be quicker industrial scale printers but I can’t imagine it being quicker than extruding a tube.

I’ve seen a lot of custom builders 3d print the hard parts i.e. the junctions at bottom brackets, disc drop out mounts, seat tube clusters etc. they say it’s higher tech and allows for higher precision which is both true but it also struck me as kind of cheating as it takes the craft out of it. At that point you’re just straight cutting tubes and welding them.

I do wonder if a fully titanium frame would ride differently though or hold up differently. I don’t doubt they are strong enough but just as you can do a million things to steel to turn it from building columns to samurai swords, surely a drawn tube must behave differently even if it’s the same alloy?

Welding causes a lot of problems, for ti bikes distortion and contamination are both constant headaches.

3D printing whole frames may help with these problems although it might not and it might just have its own problems we aren’t fully aware of.

Frame stiffness just comes down to the shape of the frame and elastic modulus of the material.

On the material side, elastic moduli of drawn and printed titanium are about the same.

On the shape side, a printed frame could be very similar in tube shape and size, or it could be radically different. So far printing has been mostly small tricky bits like brake mounts and tube junctions, which have little to do with overall frame stiffness.

So if the frame shape remains about the same, printed vs tubular ti should have roughly equal stiffness.

They are using a really tall 3d printer. I'm not convinced of the utility of doing this, but I like the tech.

3D Printing removes a bunch of employee time.. that might help with some of the cost issues. Remove the time the employees need to put the tubes in a jig, machine tubes, weld tubes, etc. Or remove the carbon layup time.

I barely have any insight into this either, but I do know what big conglomerates have access to with additive manufacturing is way way beyond what we see as consumers.

Pratt & Whitney got a batch of contaminated powder, used to make GTF engine parts.
Now they have quite a mess to clean up.

https://aviationweek.com/mro/supply-...s-gtf-problems