Ok I swore I'd never join this site but damn it, the seller's making up crap about the company.
#1 Titan was an established company with a long history of making titanium frames. They're responsible for teaching the welders at Sandvik's Sport division how to weld up bicycle frames among other things. The welds on the Titan frames always looked a bit rushed compared to the nice Tig-fillets of say Merlin or Litespeed, but they were never the splotchy/ground down things on those ebay frames.
#2 They were doing butted seamless drawn titanium tubing on their frames (the headtubes happened to be externally taper butted as it happens) and would not have had to join to pieces of tube together to make a butted tube. The seller's "expert" is a moron if that's how he thinks you make butted tubes. Titan Ti Compe frames, in the largest 20.5" size are 3.5 pounds INCLUDING the Titan Ti BB and that's after they were painted to boot.
#3 The pricetag for the frameset was $999 as reported (merlin frames alone were well north of that in 1994), and a full bike as tested in the July 1994 Bicycling magazine was $1899 with Deore LX, a Showa suspension fork, and Titan Ti pedals, Bar and Bottom Bracket and seatpost (they were the only titanium 26.6 posts made).
#4 The production frames came sized for 1 1/4" steerer tubes/headsets, the BB shells are unthreaded and take a proprietary press-fit cup cartridge bearing BB with a Ti spindle which uses lock-collars on the ends to hold it in place (think old FatChance/Merlin frames), and otherwise were pretty normal in part sizes (26.6 post, 28.6 bottom pull front derailleur, 135mm dropouts).
#5 The cable housing guides basically clipped into the frame along the toptube for the brake cable, and the downtube they mounted into a bottle cage eyelet similar to the way those plastic guides fit under BB shells of many frames. The stays got welded in guides and I don't know why Titan did it that way but I had to improvise a mount for my downtube as my frame didn't come with the factory guide piece (nor the Ti post, pedals, or bar... but it DID the BB fortunetly).
#6 Production frames were also painted, in a green tinted metallic satin paint which faded into a solid green headtube with neon pink and green decals OR a polished finish with neon pink and blue decals. The one tested by Bicycling had the polished finish and mine has the painted finish.
As I explained to mtbmaniac when he PM'ed me on mtbr, the likely reason for these ground headtubes, welded toptube guides and overall crappy welds on those Ebay frames is someone took a titan frame and tried to modify it to take a 1 1/8 steerer suspension fork of longer travel than they originally came spec'ed for (around 2" travel). Titan certainly wouldn't have done the frames like that as they could simply have ordered a different size of headtube (their BMX Ti frames for example all used the standard 1" steerer sized headsets that all BMX bikes did) and it would have been one seamless tube.
Now for some pictures of my frame and bike... (which I need to update as I've changed its setup back to knobbies and a triple-chainring)
