Titanium bolts

Anyone use Titanium hardware? I had a customer bring me a bike that had a seized caliper and needed disassembled. (92 ZX7). He had put in 4 of these TI bolts in the caliper halves and could not get one out. In my experience Ti Bolts especially ALLEN, chip real easy if the driver isn’t seated completely. He had broken his trying to remove a bolt that had seized. Probably from two dissimilar metals, TI and Magnesium. I tried everything to drill off the head of this bolt. I tried Titanium Drill bits, Cobalt bits and Bits for drilling Titanium. NO GO! I could not get this bolt out. As of this morning have tried everything. He is looking at having to buy a new caliper. I post this as a warning about the use of TI bolts. I had another case were Ti bolts were used on the brake rotors and were installed using loctite as you should. The shoulder of the bolt chipped out from the operator not fully seating the driver and when it was brought to me, I could never get it out.

Titanium is very pretty, light and obviously from this post very HARD! I like it because it doesn’t corrode. I also use a lot of it and have found it is prone to seizure. USE ANTI SEIZE! Be careful with Titanium Hardware to fully seat the allen driver or socket. If you chip out the corners or round it off, you may not get it out.

This is why we use the high dollar Snap-on tools that perfectly fit the fasteners and don’t start to wear on there edges and then turn inside the fasteners rounding them out.

Once the fastener rounds out internally due to a worn allen driver or chips out, you may never get it out.

I use a torque wrench on everything because to me that’s part of the FUN of working on my bikes.

Ken Waters

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