Originally Posted by
MezzoLew
As an engineer, I would add that the stiffness of a titanium fork may have been too high and what you want from a front fork (and the rear fork too) is the ability to disperse the forces from a rough road and smooth out the ride. I guess my teeth might fall out if I rode a bike with titanium forks!
I owned a Teledyne back in the day.
Flexy, comfortable. It did "plane" in certain circumstances. A bit unnerving when braking hard, the wheelbase drastically shortened, like up to 15 mm. You got used to it.
Part of the lateral flex could have been the collared down downtube in two sections. I understand why they did it, but a significant compromise.
The fork... Too bad they did not think out of the box enough and just do a straight bladed fork. My thought the radius work hardened the tubes in the wrong place.
Could have used an 1 1/8" steerer, under the BB cable routing too... The engineers knew they had to increase the tube diameter to get reasonable stiffness... they had to tool up the fork crown anyway...
Tandem headsets did exist...
I do have a later brand X ti fork, a unicrown style creation, pretty terrific, but very limited tire size capable.