Forget wood fired pizza, titanium fired pizza has a way better flavor.

I wonder if they really used the pizza alibi for all the titanium or if they diversified. Did they really put all their eggs in one basket?

Can’t wait for the YouTube video about this - should be a good DIY series

They used multiple front companies and routed orders through third-world countries to buy the needed ore. More than likely, pizza ovens--or more likely, I'm guessing unspecified parts for pizza ovens--were just one of many cover stories used by those companies, and at least some of them were probably more believable than pizza ovens. You wouldn't use the same cover story for all the companies making the purchased.

Plus, titanium dioxide is used as a pigment, which would have reasonably explained a great deal of the rutile ore they purchased.

They didn't know that at the time. Not an outrageous story as hotter is generally better for pizza ovens.

> They didn't know that at the time.

Hard to imagine they even tried to find out as the lie would quickly become obvious with just a little effort.

Rutile is used in refractory bricks and the import was of the ore mineral. So not completely unbelievable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutile#Application

There was no shortage of TiO₂ in the US. It's used everywhere. They were specifically importing the refined metal because the soviets had the only viable production capacity.

> There was no shortage of TiO₂ in the US.

But the article says that the US lacked the ore:

“Back when they were building the airplane the United States didn’t have the ore supplies – an ore called rutile ore. It’s a very sandy soil and it’s only found in very few parts of the world.”

Also, the Wikipedia link above doesn’t show the US to be major producer. It does show ex-Soviet block countries to be major producers.

I mean, you might be right about importing the metal rather than ore. I’m commenting only about whether the ore is widely available in the US.

There's plenty of titanium in the us. They opened a mine in the Adirondacks just for this purpose in WW2, and there's tons of untapped ore. Chances are that it was cheaper to get from the USSR than to make it ourselves

This is the case for many materials. The raw material itself is not rare, the bottleneck is the refining/processing capability and thus the refined material is scarce.

- The shortage of lumber in US a few years was due to lack of saw mills, not trees

- Shortage of semi-conductor grade Neon due to lack of plants that can refine the gas to the required purity

- Shortages of oil derived products due to constraints on refining

- "Rare earth" shortages as few countries refine. China is one of the few countries willing to tolerate the pollution generated from the refining processes.

You don't quite need 1500C or so Ti alloys can tolerate to bake a pizza.

The capitalists are decadent bourgeois pigs, who could fathom the whims of their lifestyles?

(this is a joke)

I swear to you, there is an untapped market for titanium pizza ovens. Maybe for camping gear. Maybe for stationary ovens. But fire + titanium + father's day? It practically sells itself. Titanium pizza peels are already on the market. Who needs this shit?

We told the Iranians we were making a space opera movie called Argo, and needed to scout locations as a cover story to get out the embassy employees. Strange is what makes a cover story good!

Yes. This is just another generated content farm.