[CR]Luged Ti frames

Subject: Luged Ti frames

Back when I was building frames in Portland I ran Into Pino Morroni. He used to visit Portland as he had a crush on a young female national track champion Kathy Eckroth. He gave one of the very few Pino Ti luged frames to her to race. Berringer did the brazing, he was the world expert on brazing. I asked Berringer how he did it and he would not tell me. It turns out the early Ti tubing was made in Albany Oregon, I think the company was called Oregon Metallurgical. I went there and met the guy that did the tubing for Pino. It was a big buck project and as I remember Bianchi paid for it. The stays were even tapered. Anyway, they did not know how to braze Ti so I kept checking around. I ended up at the U.S. Bureau of Mines, Albany Research Center http://www.netl.doe.gov/about/arc_history.html http://www.netl.doe.gov/about/arc_history.html and somehow the head of the lab liked me or something. Anyway he spent a whole day showing me this amazing place. They had basically developed all the technology for Zirconium production in the USA, used for reactors and atom bombs. But Titanium is very similar and they did the work on it also. He showed me a 3 speed bike they made in the 1950's using Ti for the frame, I am sure the first one ever. Anyway, he looked into the brazing and came back with a gold based alloy and it had to be done in a vacuum. All this was way out of my limited resources at the time. I did make some parts from Ti in the 1970's, I had friends working at Precision Cast Parts. They made aircraft engine parts from Ti and I got some "G" job work done for me.

Jim Merz

Big Sur CA