Advice: Titanium Frame

[cadence90]

That frame looks great .. some of the cleanest welds in the biz. Molto bene!

If I ever build a Ti bike I'll look real close at Kish, sounds like you've had a good experience. What size is that frame and do you know it's weight?

The experience is superb. I think Jim Kish is really terrific and I would absolutely recommend him and his work.
I'll post more on the bike later, but the frame is 59.5 x 58.5 virtual. The tubes are 1.5" DT; 1.375" TT; 1.25" ST; the chainstays are 7/8" ovalized/tapered.
The frame weight is 1444g.

[Scapin/Dean]

Both Moots and Dean confirmed that they use Paragon's "Breezer" style dropouts. The reason is that they are much easier to weld onto the stays than are 'standard' dropouts. Only four welds for a Breezer as opposed to eight for the standard.

[cadence90]

And they are stiffer dropouts.

[bobalou]

And they are stiffer dropouts.

Makes sense that it would be stiffer. It's an interesting design .. and they're vertical! I imagine that might make a wheel change easy and there's probably zero chance it could get misadjusted.

[cadence90]

Yes, they're easy to get in/out of as well as stiff.
The only "downside" is that off-center skewer lever arms (which are most of the them), can only close in the areas outside the hood, not a big deal really. I point mine out the back anyway as a rule.
These are the Paragon Machine dropouts.

[Adri]

Adri - I am quoting what the folks at both Dean and Moots told me. Perhaps Dean is higher if one counts the aluminum and steel frames they have welded outside. But Dean stated 800+ titanium and Moots stated ~1000 frames (they only build titanium at this point - used to do some steel). I can't imagine very many more frames going through the Dean shop due to its limited size. I can imagine two or three times the capacity going through Moots, though, as it is so large.

Ok, thx for the extensive tour of both factories , it was really an interesting experience both for you and for us.

[Delpi]

Scapin uses the same solution (dropouts) in his steel frames.

Cadence90
your frame is really cool!!!!

[cadence90]

Thank you Delpi. I think so too!
GPT....

[Adri]

oh yes Cadence, that Kish looks very nice. The finishing of the welds and the overall craftmanship are amazing. I added Kish to my list of titanium framebuilders.

[cadence90]

Thanks Adri!
Kish's work is very good.
That's a very nice link. How did you decide who to put on the list?

[Adri]

At first the list was short, but the more I learned about titanium, the more links I got. Some manufacturers even contacted me and asked me if I would put them on the linklist, so that list must be quite popular by now. Perhaps it shows up under a Google search, I'm not sure.
Each time I learn about a new manufacturer, I put him on. So the list keeps on growing.