NEW PRODUCT: Titanium Hooded Thru Axle Fork Dropouts

Heads up framebuilders: We are now offering our hooded titanium fork dropouts for sale!

These are the same 35mm OD dropouts used on our Bespoke Titanium Forks and our Production Titanium Forks like the TiGV gravel and TiPAK29 MTB forks.

Available as a set including replaceable aluminum inserts for either 12mm (gunmetal grey) or 15mm (silver or black) thru axles.

Check em’ out while they’re hot hot hot!

Fork: Hooded Thru Axle Dropouts

from $105.00

Reynolds R3D Printed Titanium Dropouts Available

Developed in conjunction with legendary UK tubing manufacturer Reynolds Technology Limited, the R3D printed titanium dropout is one of many products available for direct order in our Framebuilding section.

Titanium Production Forks: 2019 Unicrown + New Graphic

Heads up for those interested in our titanium production forks — We currently have all models available, with regular re-stocking orders continuing through the fall.

TiGV + TiPAK :: UNICROWN

New for 2019, we have redesigned our TiGV and TiPAK titanium production forks to utilize the same unicrown construction as the Ti29+ and TiFAT titanium production forks. The result is a stiffer, lighter, generally more durable fork that has a more refined look than the segmented design.

Not sure what the difference is? See the image below.
Definitely sure what the difference is and have your heart set on a segmented fork?
Or maybe you’re looking for the perfect mate for a 9QR frame and wheelset you already own and want a quick release TiGV fork?
Or you want to use panniers with your Ti29+ fork?
No problem! We are now offering a SEMI-CUSTOM option for all of our forks, meaning you can dial in your part with exactly the features you want.

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NEW FORK GRAPHIC

Along with the redesigned crown we have also updated the logo graphic for titanium forks, switching to a single Matte Etched chevron on the drive side leg for a cleaner, more minimal look. And as always if you’d like paint, powdercoat, or anodized and etched graphics we are happy to do that for you under our SEMI-CUSTOM program.

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Fork: TiGV

Whether you are cruising recreational trails like the Banks-Vernonia, pushing your limits racing in the Oregon Triple Crown series, or navigating your hometown streets on the commute to work, the TiGV fork will suit you well.

FAVORITE TIRE PAIRING: WTB Horizon 650Bx47c

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True story: The TiPAK fork’s biggest fans are Salsa Fargo owners, folks converting 29er hardtails from trail bikes to adventure rigs, and bike touring aficionados.

FAVORITE TIRE PAIRING: Schwalbe G-One Speed 29x2.35

Fork: TiPAK 29"

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Fork: Ti29+

Rutted and washed out 4x4 roads. Flowy singletrack. Lost Coast beach rides. Game trails. The Ti29+ is ready when you are.

FAVORITE TIRE PAIRING: Maxxis Chronicle 29x3.0

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From Point Barrow to Pismo Beach and every sandy, soggy, boggy, muddy slice of heaven in between, there are few human powered pursuits that rival ripping otherwise unrideable terrain on a fat bike. Get some, and then some!

FAVORITE TIRE PAIRING: 45NRTH VanHelga 27.5x4.0

Fork: TiFAT

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Zwei Tandem S&S eTap

Tandems are beasts unto themselves. They have more or less been around as long as the modern bicycle itself, their popularity waxing and waning for a century before a renaissance in the 1970s that cemented the captain/stoker seating arrangement as a thing. (Ironically, 1972 was the last modern Olympic Games to include tandem cycling).

Today tandems are fairly common; you don't see a lot of them, but you've definitely seen them and know what they are. If you've ever ridden with one while on a standard single bicycle you can attest to how remarkably fast they can go in the hands of two competent tandem riders.

Not only is this custom titanium Zwei Tandem build built for speed, it is built for travel. With a suite of S&S couplings this two-person road rocket fits into a couple of regulation size suitcase boxes and checks just like any other baggage. The brilliance of the couplers is nowhere more apparent than on a bike with a SRAM eTap drivetrain; disconnect the rear brake and the bike is ready to disassemble and pack.

This build is outfitted with lightweight carbon fiber components, a Gates Carbon Drive timing belt, tandem specific wheels from our friends down the road at Rolf-Prima, and one of Dave's bespoke titanium forks.

Semi-Custom Road Disc with Campagnolo H11

We developed our Semi-Custom program to give our customers expanded options to find the perfect bike for their intended use, budget, and timeline. Just as with our full custom bespoke bikes, we work with our customers to dial in exactly what they're after, from the geometry and materials to the cosmetic finish and build out. To move semi-custom projects through our schedule more quickly we have a trusted subcontractor weld them up in batches, avoiding the 10-12 month lead time of our bespoke frames to get folks out on the road or trail rather than waiting in line.

This fantastic road disc build with Campagnolo H11, Enve Composites cockpit, and equisitely balanced half-flashy-half-classic finish work by Black Magic Paint is the perfect example of a beautiful, high performance, no compromise bike.

Service: Complicated Repair Archive // Lemond Tete de Course

The motto around the Ti Cycles shop is "Anything Is Possible". If something was made once, it can be made again.

One of the more complicated frame repairs in recent memory was a composite Lemond Tete de Course, half titanium and half carbon fiber, that required a downtube replacement.

Before we could replace the titanium tube we needed to un-bond the top of the frame from the bottom. For this task we called on our friends at Ruckus Composites here in Portland, masters of the art of carbon fiber. 

The carbon sections needed to be out of the frame, but able to be put back in to place to set up the frame jig for welding the new downtube to the original bottom bracket shell and head tube. During this process while the downtube is out of the frame the head tube is completely disconnected, as are the carbon fiber tubes, meaning the frame is almost completely disassembled. Only the chainstay welds at the dropouts and bottom bracket shell remain from the original assembly.

After the new downtube was installed the titanium sections were brushed up to a beautiful shine and transported in a box back to the Ruckus labs for the carbon fiber reassembly. Then the frame came back to us one last time for final detailing and wax anti-fingerprint sealant before heading home to its owner.

"Everyone is impressed with the work and craftsmanship of Ti Cycles, as the frame looks beautiful. Your service and final product was excellent."

Custom Titanium Racks + Bits for Seven Cafe Racer

This past winter we had the pleasure of building a suite of bespoke titanium components for a cafe racer project the folks at Pleasant Hill Cyclery in the Bay Area were working on. The overview is straightforward -- a titanium fork, front and rear racks, and pant guard for the Gates Carbon Drive -- but there were plenty of details to sort through.

Starting from scratch we had four individual pieces to fabricate, some of which interface with each other directly, and all of which needed to bolt up to an existing frame built by another shop. Seven Cycles does good work, so we had a solid foundation to build from, and Loc at Pleasant Hill Cyclery was organized, specific, and generally great to work with.

The custom titanium fork is a fantastic piece of hardware. Our 1.5" Tapered, sleeved unicrown design with a solid 15TA dropout and a smart and smooth 58mm of offset. Disc only with the hose running through the leg and mounts for fenders and our front rack. 

The front rack is a sleek, minimal, slightly swoopy mini platform with an internally wired dynamo light mount out front and a standard tombstone bag loop in the back. The legs were specified with a unique and deceptively complicated design element that needed to be square, symmetrical, and pretty but also weight bearing. They turned out great.

The rear rack would also have internal wire routing and a dynamo light mount at the rear. Opposite of the front rack, the rear would have no cargo platform but instead carry saddle bags. Effectively a series of intersecting loops, the rack construction makes for a sleek profile. An additional feature of the rear rack is a set of light housings for LED running lights. We used bullets for oversize chainstays as the end caps for the housings, adding just the tiniest bit of complimentary flare to the rack package's art deco sensibilities.

To tie everything together a titanium pant guard for the belt drive was made to mount discretely to the bottom bracket shell and snugly into the Seven rear dropout, with no additional mounting points required.

A gallery of the component package we built is below, and you can check out the final build out with RuthWorks SF bags and a happy rider here.

Service: Titanium Derailleur Hanger Repair

For such a small part of a frame, the little dangly derailleur hanger is involved in an inordinate number of repairs. It is a small piece of material, but it is vitally important, unfortunately located, and relatively fragile.

Most classic frames and some modern custom frames built for confident ballers have contiguous or "fixed" derailleur hangers that are part of the dropout itself. Because it is so vital and fragile, modern mass produced bikes generally have replaceable hangers that bolt on with smalls screws, allowing a failure mechanism that in most cases has no potential to ruin the entire frame. Regardless of the main frame material, these replaceable hangers are primarily aluminum or titanium.

A sensible and practical design feature, replaceable hangers can still be poorly executed. Photos below show one such design; a replaceable hanger made of steel on a high end titanium frame where the mounting holes on the dropout leave precious little material around the edge and have a countersink radius that cuts right through the heat affected zone of the chainstay weld.

The latter situation resolved itself in a crack through the weld, even though the hanger was ruined at the same time of the source impact. We can easily repair the crack, but the original flaws in the design still remain and would surely cause the same result in another crash.

As a solution Dave fabricated a new titanium hanger to match the interface and location of the original, and then welded it all together into a solid hanger far stronger than the original. 

Service: YBB

The Moots YBB system, still in use today, came to prominence two decades ago and saw widespread use by several prominent titanium mountain bike builders. The system is simple, using a monostay configuration with a spring and/or elastomer stanchion up top and vertically compliant chainstays down low to allow for vertical movement of the rear axle. At a time when full suspension designs were often large, complex, heavy, and largely ineffective, a YBB "soft tail" could smooth much of the chatter of XC trails with relatively little fuss. 

With the breakneck pace of modern suspension improvements the YBB soft tail system may seem rudimentary, but it has proven extremely durable and reliable over the years and is an integral part of many great vintage mountain bikes, most of which are still on the trails.

But all things wear out in time, and we have regularly been servicing YBB systems on Moots, Merlin, Litespeed, and other titanium bikes for many years. Generally this consists of cleaning and lubricating the parts still fit for service, or machining a new stanchion, and in the case of Litespeed modifying the Moots YBB guts that are still available to fit in the smaller diameter setup.

A recent Merlin project presented a different challenge; not only did the YBB guts need serviced, the aluminum bridge clamping mechanism connecting the suspension with the rear end had cracked, requiring the machining of a whole new yoke.

As far as we know this is the only Merlin Fat Beat on the planet with a black yoke, made entirely in house.

Service: Cinelli Quill Stem Update

Cinelli quill stems are part of cycling history. There are thousands upon thousands of them in circulation on vintage bikes of all types with threaded fork steerers. They're a great part, save for one weird little bit -- the stock Cinelli quill stem bolts use a 7mm hex key and have a 7mm x 1mm thread draw bolt with a tapered nut.

This 7mm business is problematic for a couple of reasons. Virtually no multi tool or standard hex tool set includes a 7mm wrench. There are no draw bolts with 6mm hex fittings and 7x1 thread. Standard 8mm draw bolts have both a different thread size and a head diameter that is too large for the 12mm pocket in most vintage stem bodies.

We of course partially solved this issue with our M8 stainless steel and M8 titanium draw bolts, which have an optional aluminum wedge we machine in house as an upgrade to the clunky cast steel wedges found in many traditional quills. Those bolts both have a 12mm OD head that will fit in the Cinelli stem body, but the M8 threading is incompatible with the Cinelli cone nut and our wedges will not work with the tapered nut system.

To cut through all of these contradictions at once and do the world a favor by slowly removing the oddball 7mm bolts and cones from circulation we are now offering a fantastic update service to make this style of Cinelli quill stem compatible with standard 8mm draw bolts.

You send in your stem, we change the thread size on both the cone anchoring the quill draw bolt and the single pinch bolt handlebar clamp to 8mm and provide 8mm titanium bolts with normal 6mm hex fittings for both locations. 

Yep, you can have a Cinelli quill stem that is both lighter and more convenient!
We are here to help.

Service: Serotta Dropout Repair

After building a fantastic titanium bike for a new customer, keeping an older one on the road is the next best thing. Our repair services bring us much joy, and of course our customers are pretty pleased as well!

Most of the frame failures we see on frames manufactured by other builders fit into predictable categories. One of those is "the Serotta crack" on the beautiful windowed dropouts found on Ottrott, Legend Ti, and other frames, which in turn is often linked to improper maintenance of the seat stay bearing those dropouts are used in conjunction with.

If your Serotta frame with this dropout design has not cracked but your bearings have never been serviced, now is the time for some preemptive maintenance. Please get in touch to make arrangements for sending in your frame for bearing service. (Because of the bearing location being in such close proximity to a crucial carbon/titanium bond joint we strongly discourage anyone not familiar with this particular construction from attempting to service the bearings.)

If your Serotta frame with this dropout design has cracked don't fret, we can bring it back to life!

We have done a number of these repairs and have great success. Our current pricing is ~$375 for the full repair service, including the dropout repair and bearing replacement. Bearing service only generally runs ~$125 including parts and labor. You can read more about it on the Serotta Dropout Service page.