Identify Titanium (maybe) bike
- Thread starter interceptor75
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TreaderSteve
Senior Retro Guru
Looks a good frame - it'd need to be cheap to bring it up to scratch but when finished with better kit and with the right forks could be a nice little rocket. Let us know how you get on
joglo
Senior Retro Guru
you're right!
Some more interesting details on the frame, by the designer Dan Falvey in a thread in a polish MTB forum
https://forum.retromtb.pl/viewtopic.php?t=6242
The Titanium Pro was my personal project. The frame design for the time had a steeper head tube angle and the sloping top tube and early Compact-design direction that is so popular today. My reason for the sloping top tube was to keep from injuring your private parts when a quick exit off the frame was necessary! But really for extra room to lift the frame over obstacles when necessary. I had a bad experience with a level top tube and never forgot it. But the sloping top tube did allow for a bit lighter and stiffer frame, but this wasn’t the reason for it.
Your frame was built in the Tri-Cities area of Eastern Washington state by the Sandivik Corporation. Sandivik (I believe a Swedish company) had a titanium processing group there because of the Nuclear Power industry that was in the area that supported the very large aluminum industry in the area with power (this was because of Boeing being in Seattle, and in WW2, there was a large hydro power dam built there to support the war effort in aluminum manufacturing for the west coast aircraft manufacturers. I found Sandvik true my friends at Dean Bicycle, who was having Sandvik build all the Dean Titanium frames. I found that Sandvik’s TIG welders were some of the best I had ever worked with. So I contracted them to build all of the Kästle titanium MTB frames. Only 25 of the frames like yours were ever built.
We shipped the bare frames to Italy and built each one to our dealers specification. I offered both the Shimano XT and SunTour groups as options. I used either Spinner or Rock Shox forks as options. I believe the rims and tires were from Ritchey. Other parts were selected by me as needed. BTW, the Dan Falvey System means that, besides good handling frame design, that all of the parts specified on ergonomically sound principles. This meant that the handle bar width, stem length and crank arm length were adjusted to the size of the frame, instead of a one-size-fits-all approach. This meant more work for me, but our dealers loved it.
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Chapeau!
I found a bike a while ago in a similar state - awful EVERYTHING, but the frame was clearly Ti, and I was pretty sure what it was - these types of find can give fantastic bargains
https://www.retrobike.co.uk/threads/faux-orange-ti-ti-more-ti.465330/
