Their mixed materials
Cicli Barco’s Gianluca Barco tells us why, if you want to make a frame this good, you have to break a few tubes
Black may be the most mainstream colour in bicycles, but orange is arguably the most iconic. After all, it was the livery for Eddy Merckx’s fearsome Molteni team, which won 663 races – including eight Grand Tours, three World Championships and every Monument – between 1958 and 1976. Funny, then, that the makers of this rather handsome bike had reservations about its paint.
‘We weren’t convinced about the orange,’ laughs Gianluca Barco. ‘But when we built it, my family and I were like, “Oh, OK, it works!”’
Perhaps it’s because the Barcos are Italian, not Belgian, or perhaps it’s just that orange is a bit garish (the ‘Molteni orange’ was said to be inspired by the colour of the salami that Molteni, the sponsor, produced). But regardless of the reasons for the colour of this Cicli Barco creation, what’s indisputable is the level of care paid to what lies beneath. Carbon and steel play their parts, but it’s the expert fabrication at this bike’s heart that makes it so special.
Many hands
This isn’t Cyclist ’s first encounter with Cicli Barco. In issue 72 we took a trip to the family’s workshop on the outskirts of Padua in northern Italy and met youngest son Gianluca, mum and dad Fabiola and Alberto, and Alberto’s brother, Maurizio. Between them exists a century’s worth of framebuilding experience. Add in Gianluca’s late grandfather and you start to get the picture. The Barcos know bikes.
‘My grandfather, Mario, built bikes for Torpado [a former stalwart of the Italian bike market]; my parents and uncle built for Scapin when they still had a large factory in Italy. Today we make bikes for around 20 other brands, but in 2007 we started building custom frames with our name on as well.’
The frames for ‘other brands’ are all but exclusively made from steel, the material the brothers grew up watching their father work with and, along with Fabiola, who worked in Scapin’s paint department, became master builders in themselves. However, as Cicli Barco the family has been able to experiment, and perhaps never more so than here.
Mixed-material bikes are nothing new. For a while in the 1990s there was a mainstream trend for carbon fibre seatstays on alloy frames, then latterly some independent steel framebuilders made frames with carbon seat tubes. However, it’s a rare thing to see a carbon fibre seat tube, down tube and lone driveside chainstay in an otherwise steel frame. But there are reasons.
‘The feeling of carbon and steel together is something not many people can understand,’ says Gianluca. ‘They know carbon as being stiff, they know steel is lively, but together the result is really impressive.
‘It is lighter, slightly, but the feeling blends the two materials’ comfort and stiffness together so well. This is the reason for the carbon chainstay on one side only. This is a higher-stress area so it benefits from the stiffness of carbon where the other side can remain steel to balance this stiffness.’
Make to destroy
If the steel-carbon concept sounds simple on paper, the execution, says Gianluca, is anything but. This frame is made from Columbus Spirit, considered by builders to be Columbus’s lightest tubeset, and one of its most expensive. Yet of the very high-end steel tubes that go into this bike, nearly a third end up in the bin.
‘First you have to build the whole frame in steel. Everything. And it has to be perfectly aligned. Because what happens next is you cut out the down tube, seat tube and chainstay and then cut the “lug” shapes into the metal left. Only then do you mitre and bond in the carbon tubes.
‘If the frame isn’t straight in the first place the carbon won’t fit, and that probably means you go to the bin and then back to the drawing board. If you make a mistake cutting, it’s also back to the drawing board. So you measure, not twice but three or four times. And maybe sometimes you go away and think about it for a day and come back tomorrow!’
Gianluca sounds like he’s speaking from bitter experience, but he explains this very rarely happens, if ever. The process is one his parents and uncle learned and practised many times over at Scapin, which once produced somewhat similar frames. So while this frame might take around 30 hours to produce, and the Barcos might only produce a handful in their name per year, in their lifetime the family has produced hundreds similar to this mixed-material design, and has spent countless hours perfecting this process. And it shows.
Look closely and there are mudguard bosses craftily incorporated into the tubes, and the frame itself has plenty of clearance for 28mm tyres. Look closer still and you’ll see the top tube bears an inset custom logo and enamelled Italian flag while the head tube is wrapped in a beautifully crafted head badge delicately screwed on with Torx bolts. But ultimately it’s the incredibly smooth lines that make this bike what it is, the Tig-welds appearing braze-smooth, the brazed joints looking as homogenous as if cast, and everything lining up just so.
No mistakes. Just how the Barcos like it.
‘The feeling of carbon and steel is something not many people can understand. They know carbon as being stiff, they know steel is lively, but together the result is really impressive’