Jery Moos postulates: snip< One wonders why the Ti Ideale is so little known today, and indeed I don't remember it getting a lot of notice In The Day. Perhaps the tim e was simply not right, as the newer plastic saddles were in vogue, and tra ditional leather saddles were coming to be thought of a old fashioned, Ti r ails or not. As we have seen from this past thread, a Ti railed leather saddle can be made about the same weight as a plastic saddle with steel rai ls, but not much lighter. And I would imagine that, Ti still being prett y exotic in 1977, the Ti Ideale was quite expensive, probably several times more than a Cinelli Unicanitor of the same weight. So maybe Brooks just waited until a market for leather saddles had been established again, this time more of a niche market, and one that they thought would support a hig h priced "luxury" product.> end snip
My guess is that the titanium available at the time (mostly CP or commercia lly pure) was not suitable for saddle undercarriages. I remember a numbe r of early Ti and AL carriages breaking in the 70s. Newer alloys of tita nium are much, much stronger than CP. A simple case of innovation before its time. Our industry is full of examples - anatomical saddles and ful l suspension, for example, were available before 1900, but had to wait to be re-introduced as "the latest innovation" when materials and constructio n methods caught up with ideas. The ideas, in most cases, were not "stol en" so much as forgotten and re-discovered. Remember the quote from awhi le ago that said (and I para-phrase) if steel didn't have such a long histo ry, it would be heralded as the new wonder material for bicycles.
Cheers,
Mark Ritz
Rainy Arcata, CA, USA
http://www.kinetic-koffee.com
ritzmon.blogspot.com