Butted vs. Straight-Gauge Titanium: The Differences and Why It Matters
Titanium is an incredibly strong, lightweight, and tough material, which is why it’s found in everything from Formula One race cars to military applications and even Apple Watches. And, of course, our own high-performance Haley bicycle frames. It’s a highly tunable material and when designing a frame for our riders, we can tailor frame weight, stiffness, compliance, and overall costs through our mix of tubing diameters, wall thicknesses, the use of straight-gauge or butted tubing, and when using butted tubes, we can select different butting lengths and profiles.
What is Butting, Anyway?
Butting, often referred to as double-butting and triple-butting, is the gradual tapering of the internal wall thickness of a tube along its length. This process reduces material (and therefore saves weight) in the center sections of the tube, where stresses are low, while retaining material thickness at the joints, where welding heat and riding stresses are concentrated. Butted tubes are known to enhance the ride quality of a frame, and are often used to tune compliance and the so-called "liveliness" of the frame.
How Butted Tubing Is Made
The process for butting seamless steel and aluminum tubing is well established and fairly straightforward. During manufacturing, steel tubes are "drawn" and "rolled" — basically pressed with tremendous force using mandrels and dies — into the desired internally butted profiles. Titanium’s natural resilience and toughness make it much more difficult to form in this manner and therefore, butted profiles are most often created via grinding or cutting, yet still this is a challenging and expensive process due to titanium’s nature..
The first era of titanium bicycle frames relied on repurposed aircraft fuel-line tubing, which was straight-gauge and somewhat limited in terms of wall thickness and tube diameters. Over time, more options became available, and a few pioneering brands began offering high-end models with butted titanium tubes at a premium. Today, frame builders have access to titanium tubes in a variety of shapes, sizes, and butting profiles designed specifically for bicycles. At Haley, we use butted tubes from Reynolds, which we believe are the highest quality available.
Your Next Bike: Choosing Between Butted or Straight-Gauge Haley
It’s easy to simplify the differences between a butted titanium frame and a straight-gauge frame to weight and cost: butted tubes will add about $500 to the cost of a Haley and reduce the weight of the frame by about half a pound. But the nuances go beyond dollars and grams.
At Haley Bicycles, we’ve found that our butted titanium frames deliver a subtle but noticeably more refined and responsive ride compared to straight-gauge titanium. By thinning the midsections of our tubes in low-stress areas, we’re able to improve flexibility and better absorb vibrations, resulting in a smoother, more comfortable ride. Straight-gauge titanium, while durable and compliant, tends to feel more rigid due to the consistent tube thickness. With our butted frames, the lighter weight and tailored stiffness provide a livelier, more dynamic feel, especially noticeable on long rides. Ultimately, our butted titanium frames strike the perfect balance between strength, durability, and a sublime riding experience.
That said, if we didn’t feel confident that we could thoughtfully craft a Haley out of straight-gauge tubes that delivers a ride rivaling the best bikes out there — regardless of material — we wouldn’t offer it as an option.
Want to dive deeper into the nuances of titanium tube selection? Let’s talk.