Titanium and Pens - What's the Big Deal?

In the knife world titanium is well known for it's strength and lightness on knife handles. And if you pick up a current knife made from titanium they are surprisingly light - even the big knives.

But when it comes to the pen collecting world, the serious pen collectors appear to prefer copper, brass, stainless steel, gold and silver in their pens.

The knife collectors and EDC enthusiasts tend to prefer titanium. Titanium has a number of advantages - it's light to carry, it's pretty well indestructible in normal circumstances, it can be anodized by various methods to produce some amazing colors and patterns - far more than other metals.

And for anyone looking for a tactical pen or glass breaker pen, other metals like brass, copper, aluminium, gold, silver etc are generally not strong enough. Stainless steel might be the one exception here but it does not have the other qualities that titanium has....

So next time you are looking for a pen have a look at titanium - you might be surprised......

 WHY TITANIUM?

1 : Lightness

Titanium is 4.51g/cm3 in density, higher than aluminum , lower than steel, copper and nickel, whose intensity tops all metals. In other words, its weight is nearly equal to aluminum at the same volume. However, its intensity is stronger than aluminum and even stronger than steel.

 2: Free from rust from acids and bases

Titanium is rust-proof in corrosive sea environments (even marine grade 316 stainless steel still rusts) and stable in all kinds of medias, like hydrochloric acid, nitric acid and even mixed acid.The reason is titanium has a high density and a hard oxide layer, which protects it from corrosion.

 3:Healthy Environment and Human-friendly

As titanium is non-toxic and perfectly compatible with the human body, it is widely adopted in the medical field for making items like hip and bone replacements. Titanium belongs to non-magnetic family of metals,and cannot be magnetized. Although the medical grade titanium is a purer form than the titanium used in knives and pens.

 4 : Heat & Low temperature resistance

The melting point of Titanium is extremely high. Titanium can be used for a long time at over 600 degrees, it gets stronger as the temperatures falls. But its plasticity can be kept almost constant. For this reason,titanium is the ideal material for low-temperature containers, and is used often by mountain climbers in freezing conditions for cookware where it can go from freezing to boiling with no effect.

One good extreme example of titanium used in hot and cold temperatures was on the XR-71 Blackbird jet (now retired) used by the US Air Force. Since it operated at such high altitudes and at incredibly fast speeds it's titanium body would stretch up to 12 inches as it sped through the upper atmosphere before cooling down and shrinking back to it's normal size. Titanium can take a lot of punishment.

 5 : Stronger than steel

Titanium shows a high ultimate performance (tensile strength/yield strength), which means titanium products are not easy to deform once they reach the final shape.

Unlike steel which is brittle and tends to crack under extreme stress, titanium will generally bend and flex back to it's original shape. Of course even titanium can be deformed and even broken with a lot of stress but it takes a lot more than even the strongest steels. And it can keep doing it many times over.

This is one reason it is used for knife handles. A lock bar on a knife can be bent many thousands of times under normal finger pressure. It's only under extreme pressure that titanium will fail and not bounce back to it's original shape.

Cold Steel have done a number of videos where they test the locking mechanism on titanium knives by having them hold several hundred pounds of weight until they fail.

Some of the color types on titanium pens.