Picchio Special

Your post just seemed a little "Johnny Come Lately" - especially since I backed a away a bit from the post you quoted in one of my subsequent posts. It's surprising how many people buy on hype/brand and don't do the research - and they often drop considerable coin on their purchases. I do, in fact, have an order in for a custom frame, but I went with a local builder for that one. The fact that the legendary frame building families can charge what they do is partly because of the work they did establishing the brand, not necessarily because the frames are any better (sometimes they is, sometimes they ain't). A lot of the "Grandpa built all the frames with his own two hands, then taught his son, then he taught the grandson" is marketing in any case. Many of those shops, even the small ones, had more than two hands routinely on the bikes. I like Alberto Masi's newer frames - but he's having to raise his game because the better US custom builders (and a few other builders like Pegoretti and folks like Samson and Nagasawa) have significantly raised the bar over most of what Faliero produced or could teach.