Take a very serious look at Cicli Barco http://www.ciclibarco.it

My new custom Cicli Barco XCR custom with brushed stainless steel, a Barco Viva stainless fork with a carbon steering tube, Campy Super Record 12 sp. and WR Compositi carbon parts. HED Belgium wheels and White Industries T11 hubs and Vittoria Corsa Control tires. If you look closely you will note the Campy direct mount brakes, lighter and far more beautiful than discs, but better working than regular rim brakes.

Gianluca Barco (info@ciclibarco.it)is quite fluent in English and very responsive and helpful in the design, fitting, options and production. They have a huge number of choices and options in both TIG and lugged stainless steel with stainless forks and lugs of all types. He works carefully with you on measurements. He also got me a good price on many of the carbon and Campy parts.

My custom frame cost 3,320 Euros ( $3,600) including shipping. But, it has a lot of options like name plate, Italian shield, nickel head badge, direct mount brakes, multi-color paint, the Viva fork, the carbon steering tube and Chris King headset. The base price for a XCr TIG welded frame with a curved stainless fork is 2,620 Euros ($2,900) including brushed or polished finish, one paint color, interior or exterior brake cables, and a number of other no-cost options. A stainless steel XCr lugged frame is 100 Euros more.

The bike weighs 18 lbs. 14 oz. with pedals for a size 58.5 frame. It rides very smoothly and feels alive. Also the production quality and paint is flawless. Cicli Barco won the "Best of Italy" and other awards last year at Bespoked, the British version of NAHBS. https://bespoked.cc/awards.html.

For an independent review of the Barco XCr frame look at this: https://www.cyclist.co.uk/reviews/66...rco-xcr-review

And, most importantly, Barco makes handmade steel frames for about 20 other Italian bike companies to put their own name on. The odds are extremely high that any brand name Italian steel frame is probably made by Barco, although not to the quality control levels of bikes with their own name on it. Of course, there is a huge mark up by the other bike company. The Cinelli XCr stainless frame is made by Barco but has none of the options and quality finish that mine has but it costs $4,800.

Just so you know, XCr refers to Columbus XCr stainless steel tubing. It is a relatively new product, only about 10 years old, that features very high-tech metallurgy and is triple butted. The tubes are almost paper thin but quite strong. It also happens to be the most expensive tube set in the world, currently over $800 just for the raw tubes.