[dlavery]

Originally Posted by Rick TYler

- Titanium is a pain to work with. It's hard to cut, nearly impossible to bend, and has to be welded in an inert gas environment. It is springy, though, which meets one of your criteria. The chance of your robotics team being able to work with titanium is low, however, unless you have a mentor with real experience with the metal. I wouldn't consider it.

Originally Posted by artdutra04

Titanium will eat through most general tooling like there is no tomorrow if you aren't very careful when working with it.

And there is a small chance, that if you aren't milling it correctly, it can actually catch on fire.

Titanium is surrounded by this wonderful mythology that seems to supercede reality. It actually is not all that tough to work with. It just requires some appropriate knowledge and slightly different practices when you are working with it to get the results that you want. HSS tooling will work just fine, and carbide tools will do even better. Keep surface speeds low, feed rates high, and use lots of coolant. You want to keep the cutting edge very sharp, cool, and constantly moving to prevent work hardening and/or galling. Titanium machines extremely well (you can basically treat it just like any other high-performance alloy like austenitic stainless steel), and finishes beautifully.

-dave