Building the Terra: Two Years on Titanium.
Titanium is difficult to source, difficult to weld, and difficult to justify on a spreadsheet. We chose it anyway. Here’s the two-year story of why.
Published
2024-09-05
Read time
7 min read
The Material Problem
When we started the Terra project, the brief was simple: build a gravel bike that a serious rider could own for thirty years. The material question answered itself. Steel corrodes. Carbon degrades under UV and impact. Aluminium work-hardens and fatigues. Titanium does none of these things.
The problem is that titanium is genuinely difficult to work with. It must be welded in an inert argon atmosphere. It cannot be fillet-brazed. It work-hardens under tooling faster than steel, which means tube preparation requires different speeds and lubricants. The learning curve for a frame builder moving from steel to titanium is measured in years, not weeks.
Finding the Right Supplier
We spent six months visiting suppliers before committing to a partner. Titanium tubing quality varies enormously. The grade of the alloy, the consistency of the wall thickness, the precision of the butting — all of these affect not just weight but ride quality and long-term durability.
The Terra uses 3AL-2.5V titanium for the main triangle and a dedicated steel fork. The fork choice was deliberate: steel forks have a compliance characteristic in the fore-aft axis that titanium forks, with their stiffer material properties, don’t naturally provide. The combination gives the bike its character.
What the Ride Numbers Say
We tested the final Terra geometry over 4,000km of mixed surfaces before signing off the production spec. Riders consistently described the same quality: the bike feels alive under load in a way that aluminium doesn’t. It responds to input rather than just transmitting it.
This is the quality we were chasing. It is difficult to specify in a data sheet and impossible to photograph. But it is exactly why some riders, given the choice of anything in the range, will choose the Terra every time.