A Personal Experience
Despite being staunchly anti-magnet at the time, I–like many–was fixated on the Titan’s crowdfunded development. I was lurking during the original. It was inspiring to the point where I wanted to buy one just to have a piece of history: the first–and only–purpose built titanium encased sensing magnet. By batch three, I’ll admit that the dwindling participation was making anxious at losing a chance to buy one. And then I read a comment by one of the community’s most creative misanthropes, Rosco, and my brain exploded with the possibilities. Titan and xG3 v2 ordered. Months passed. The Titan arrived while I was working and living out of a hotel room in San Diego. It would be months before I could have them installed. The package alone is a masterwork, handcrafted in Ukraine, at the direction of my predecessor, the legendary @mdanger who left bigger shoes than any one person can hope to fill.
(DT Photo… Mine is buried in storage
)
I had heard rumors of an installer in Seattle. A quick DM to @amal gave me a contact. Meeting him is an experience in itself which has been noted repeatedly on the forum. This was my second time having anything installed (the first being a flexEM and Spark 1). While it was his first time installing a Titan he happily dug out and waved about a vial containing one that @amal had given him. He installed the Titan in L5 and the xG3 v2 in R5. I accepted what was suggested would be a considerable compromise in sensing capabilities to save my fingertips on the heinous crimps of Smith Rock’s volcanic tuff.
The first thing I learned after having them installed was that when I sit in front of my computer, I tend to rest my hands on the keyboard. Not ideal. Bizarrely enough, I took great comfort in having the magnetic viewing film: being able to see the fields of the magnets and watch them change with distance provided enough dopamine to keep me from sticking anything to them (intentionally) for a month. At this point, I was working as a millwright. One day, I got call that a hydraulic unit was down. Pedal indeed does nothing. Motor, control, or 3-phase. I started to pull the solenoid to stick a screwdriver in it and then try the controls when I had an idea: left hand out against near the coil and press. It was the first time I felt the pull of an electromagnet. It was faint but there if I closed my eyes and focused. I was never able to feel current flow. Dead climber hands, poor placement, or some combination thereof was my assumption. After all was said and done, my xG3 v2 was far superior for this task.
My First Professional Titan Experience
After starting with Dangerous Things, one of my early tasks was to release @Az_F’s Pico Lodestone. It was a fascinating gizmo. And the prospect of being able to quantify biomagnet experiences and offer better informed placement decisions was exciting. There was an immediate outcry for the Titan and I remembered that when I’d had my Apex Mega installed the previous year, the aforementioned installer had tried to sell me that very same Titan. It turned out he still had it. I planned to reach out to as many people it took out of those that had spoke up on that post until I found it a home. It took one ask:
A Quest
@amal ended up tasking me with trying to bring the Titan back into production. The principal problem was that it is technically challenging. The small size, tight tolerances between the core and shell, low curie temperate of neodymium, and thermal creep of just touching off a weld made for a helluva challenge. The Titan had to be shipped and worked on in many different countries to find the highly specialized facilities that had enough free machine time to justify the absurdly small batches of tiny parts. In the post pandemic economic world, all the previous participants had either refused or raised their prices so much it wasn’t possible. @amal hadn’t had luck finding many willing to entertain the idea and those he tried yielded unsatisfactory results. There were two possible ways forward, as I saw it: continue indefinitely and hope while sinking as much time as I could find spare into finding an international smattering that could produce to @amal’s standards or find a facility that could do the machining, assembly, and handle the highly specialized welding process. It turns out that there was exactly one place in the United States that met that criteria. I also found a domestic company that could magnetize the cores post-welding. I had found an ideal way forward.
It was not meant to be. They wouldn’t respond to requests for quotes or return my calls. And so I focused on domestic facilities that could just accomplish the welding. They also were not interested. And so it went. The cost of settings up for manufacturing nearly any aspect of the Titan cost so much that they simply couldn’t justify the production of such a small run when their skilled machinists and operators could do more profitable work. I started to feel like i was in the mind control thread–I was left with the impression people were trying to talk sense into me at times. And they didn’t even know it was a subdermal magnet I was trying to have made.
With the task queue always growing and no measurable progress being made as I quested other countries that might be able to accomplish the same concentration of manufacturing to mitigate import taxes, the community’s reverence and demand for the Titan that drove me early on had been gaining weight. Each mention was a reminder that all I had done so for is cross off options.
Somewhere along the line I was pouring through our sales data and came to the Titan. Sometimes you learn things that inspire you. Sometimes they devastate. As venerated as the Titan had become, after it had settled into a regular item, its popularity had waned substantially. The amount of time I had invested already did not make the amortization period look great. While its return would generate a spike, it would settle again likely around the same level. I realized the best and only practical thing I could do until we wrapped up a considerable number of projects was to have my Titan removed and given to someone would use it the way it was meant to be used.
DTM2024
In the lead up to the Dallas meet up, I had heard @Satur9 was trying to find Titans for people. I could think of no one better suited for the task so I proposed we do it like a “you pick” at the junk yard. He agreed. The slash and stab night kicked off with @Satur9 knuckle deep inside me off and on for the better part of 40 minutes.
BLOOD
When it was finally liberated from my flesh I, along with @Satur9 and the gathered crowd, discovered just why my sensing had been so poor: it was deep AF. So deep that the pain management that had been administered didn’t work that well at the end. In early February I learned that it had finally found home and so ended an altogether unexpected three year odyssey. Or so I would have thought had it not been for events in the weeks leading up to this.
Post Script
Recent events led to us reaching out to the Titan’s packaging manufacturer:
Good day! Welcome back
Thank you, we are more or less safe. Explosions and rocket flights have become our daily routine. But we live in a big city, so we feel as safe as possible today.
I am glad that you are back - this is a good sign for me - because it says that our work is positive. I will be happy to help with the implementation of the new design.
As I see, the dimensions of the box have not changed. The design applied to the box has changed. I am a little confused in your presentation - I think that this is just a file that was not saved correctly)
Should the final design be like this?
Kyrylo
If you appreciated the craftsmanship of the Titan’s packaging and have a couple of minutes to write a message–or better yet, take a picture if you still have the box handy–feel free to drop it here or DM me so we can send them some good vibes.