A future bike tubing material?

Triathlon Forum
1

…and bulletproof, to boot.

"Dr. Vecchio’s group has been getting calls from aerospace companies and other businesses fascinated by his reports on a new, extraordinarily hard, strong and tough material whose raw ingredients are aluminum and titanium. When his team gets done with it, the stuff is stiff as steel at half the weight. It is harder than brick. If it cracks, the crack splits into ever smaller cracks that wander about and often fade away, with no shattering.

Dr. Vecchio reports in this month’s Journal of the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society that it not only makes a good lightweight structural material, it performs “spectacularly” on depth-of-penetration tests - another way to say it stops bullets. (In the lab, a tungsten rod fired at 2,000 miles per hour penetrated only halfway through a three-quarter-inch-thick sheet of Dr. Vecchio’s material.)

It also seems to possess qualities needed for lightweight armor and for aerospace applications where strength, low weight and good heat conductivity are at a premium."

2

Sounds very interesting but I’ve also read that bamboo could be the ultimate frame material. That could start an interesting low tech vs high tech material debate.

3

the most amazing stuff I’ve seen is some stuff we worked on for the space plane program. very thin sheets of titanium with layers of boron fiber between. an 1/16 inch thick sheet was not bendable at all. It was another micro-laminate but a few years older than the stuff you describe. Micro-laminates are the hot thing these days.

4

Wasn’t that originally called “Reardon Metal”? btw Who is John Galt?

5

So can it be formed into tubing?
Or would it be strong enough to to just use a couple sheets of it lined up parallel?

6

wall thickness minimums are a problem, presents similar joining issues as metal matrix tubes.

I’d make spokes out of it, perhaps chainrings if the wear were that good (hard as a brick?)

Elongation is not a bad thing.

-SD