[pasabagi]

I think it could be one of those 'grass-is-greener' scenarios. Steel is really nice to work with. It's strong and elastic and you can do all sorts of things to alter its properties, like even in a home shop.

Titanium always looks really hard to work with, just from the few times I've seen youtube types get some into their lathe chucks.

Would the added (in some ways just different) performance make up the difference? No idea. I mean, would people use so much aluminium if it wasn't straightforward to extrude it into interesting shapes? I don't think I would.

The straight characteristics of a material are one thing: what you can actually do with it are another.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanium_alloys

Looks like alloys are much more mallable, while losing almost none of the qualities of pure titanium.

Also: Go nukkular, high-temperature to be specific.

[kragen]

maybe if the blast furnace hadn't been invented nearly a thousand years ago we wouldn't be so familiar with the techniques that work well on steel

[pasabagi]

That's true. On the other hand, people have been working with flint for longer than there have been people, and it remains fiendishly hard to make anything with it.

[kragen]

that's maybe an exaggeration; people still make buildings out of flint, they make it into perfect spheres for ball mills, and when flintlock was the firing mechanism of choice, they shaped flints for rifles out of it. the main reason we don't have a lot of flint goods around is that, aside from its edge-forming powers, it doesn't have great properties: it's brittle, nonconductive and not all that pretty, much like unglazed fired clay

you can grind it into whatever shape you want if you're careful about silicosis

[TexanFeller]

The ground is covered with flint arrowheads in various parts of TX that I’ve visited and/or inhabited. It’s really hard for me to imagine Indians crafting so many of them if it were that hard to work with.

[lazide]

They had no other viable options. It is hard to work with.

[hdivider]

That's why I said titanium alloys specifically. With such a large-scale industrial transformation, definitely many alloys would be explored, to fit the needs of new industries. We don't use pure iron for any serious applications either.