EDIT: Oops I lost track of which thread I was in (had them both open in different tabs...) I will post this in the "first titanium bicycle" thread.

On the subject of early Ti frames, have I told this story yet? I took the Ti framebuilding class at UBI taught by Gary Helfrich, in '91 or '92 (I forget). After a few long days of nonstop welding we got a rest day, a field trip to Teledyne Wah Chang in Albany OR, at that time the largest maker of Ti billets and pierced billets (from which seamless tubing is made). The operation was so gigantic we had to drive from one building to the next in cars. Forges that looked to be the size of a cruise ship, except then you find out that the thing extends two stories down below the floor, the part you see is a fraction of the total weight. But anyway, to the main point of my story:

In the company library, when the librarian was told we were bike frame builders, it jogged a memory and he was able to find a few pics of an employee-made Ti frame from way back, '60s I think. I remember at the time thinking "hey that's before the Linair Titan" but this was over 30 years ago, so don't rely on my memory.

Unlike Linair and Barry Harvey, who made many errors in judgment that doomed the Titan, this guy did it right! He used alloy tube (probably 3/2.5) instead of the pure (CP) Ti on the titan, and it was all oversized, none of that goofy necking-down for shifters etc. like on the Titan.

Not sure if Wah Chang had even been purchased by Teledyne yet at that point, but even if it had, the various branches of Teledyne were mostly unaware of what the others were doing, so there wasn't any way that Barry or Albert Eisentraut (who helped with the Titan design), ever knew about the engineer at Wah Chang. And the guy only made one, for himself. The Librarian of course had no idea what became of the bike, maybe it's still out there somewhere. In the pics, the welds looked pretty lumpy, so maybe the bike broke and got melted down. But the world of Ti bike frames might look a lot different today if the guy had decided to form a bike frame company and hire a good welder, back in the '60s.