True, but there higher grade titanium alloys too, manganese and molybdenum. The thing I was getting at is that you can make it thicker and still be lighter than steel, plus corrosion resistance but the cost would be ridiculous!
Here i got this from a website really good info here:
So you see that in order to have the same strength, the titanium bar must be made much larger in cross section than the steel, but because of its good strength-to-weight ratio, the much larger titanium bar would still be lighter than the steel bar. Or, in other words, if the bars were exactly the same size, the titanium bar would be much weaker than the steel!! Ti alloys have superior strength/weight, but nobody said anything about strength/size!!
To illustrate graphically:
You also see from the example numbers that at knife hardnesses, the strength-to-weight ratio of the steel when hardened to RC 60 is actually a bit better than that of the Ti alloy! This is a fact often omitted by the comparisons: the strength-to-weight ratios are calculated based on materials at structural hardness (e.g. steel at RC 30-40 used as I-beams) rather than at knife hardness (RC 50-60) - strength of materials is greater at higher hardnesses, so in fact, when used for knives, steels can in fact have a similar strength/weight ratio to Ti alloys! If we redid this example with a lower carbon steel at RC 35-40, then the Ti alloy would look much better (approx 3 or 4 times better; aluminum is about 2 times better) in comparison.
