Yeah titanium isn't the most ideal material for shroud end caps given the costs and the threads prone to galling (although a light amount of graphite-based anti-seize has mitigated those issues for me). It's a lot better than AL when it comes to down thread wear and I'd argue that it has some positive benefits for harmonics, but IMO nothing comes close to it aesthetically. I get kind of mesmerized looking at it regardless of the finish lol
Aluminum is cheaper and easier to machine, but I would much rather take the slight weight penalty of using a ~316 stainless steel or even a blued carbon steel. You can only run a tap through worn / damaged AL threads so many times before the thread wear gets bad enough that the part is not perfectly concentric to the bore.
Thinner Ti rods bend too much so I chose to stick with music wire to replace my bent cocking rod. My only complaint is how difficult that it was to thread it with my lathe. There might be some expensive die out there than can thread it, but I didn't chuck it with a precision collet in my lathe and I ruined some $20 carbide threading inserts when I threaded my rod (I think I finished it with a ground cobalt HSS tool).
I machined my lever (not talking about the handle) on my small vertical mill with a piece of 1" Ti rod. I screwed up that first one after I had already spent almost two full days machining it, but I wore out SEVERAL $70-100 end mills during fabrication. The only way that I could see being able to sell a $200 Ti lever is if you already had a CAD model with the CAM tool paths and outsourced it to china (not caring about the actual grade of the materials and QC). There would be some minimum order requirement for N number of pieces and God only knows how long it would take these days to produce and receive the order.
I made a quick and dirty spreadsheet after I machined my CF/Ti shrouds just to get a ballpark of the material and (manual) labor costs. I don't have the actual spreadsheet file on this device, but this was a screenshot that I took with the actual amount of man hours that I spent making an individual shroud and Ti locking ring with my crazy tolerances inside and out:
That was formulated with the costs from about 4 months ago for the professional grade high modulus CF tubing and a 2' rod of 1" OD 6AL-4V Ti (certified material). How's that for sticker shock?! lol
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that face…
she just all “jeeeeeezzz” but yeah no your droolworthy upgrades fall into the “one can dream” category for me with them price tags… thatd prolly put more of a damper on your sales than any amount of self taught rocket scientists(funny cuz in my childhood i went on a little “spud gun dont cut it” kick in which cardboard tubes fulla what started at saltpeter and sugar pushed various payloads were sent down lengths of pvc pipe, but thats not the type im referring to here) silly criticisms could ever hope to.
