Hi
@rvw - sorry I'm so late to this party too, especially having been name-checked.
I see from my notes that when I was thinking about a titanium frame, I considered Enigma, Van Nicholas, Spa Audax, and Baldwin of York. I then read a piece by Alex Beresford in an early edition of Sportif magazine entitled "New School Ti" (five useful pages - and I'll bring a photocopy along to the Southend night ride to give to
@srw for you) and he mentioned Mawis Custom (Kleinbittersdorf near Saarbrücken, Germany where Mathias Scherer is building a sub-kilo titanium frame), Enigma near Eastbourne, Dolan, and Baldwin Burls:
www.mawis-bikes.com
www.enigmabikes.com
www.dolan-bikes.com
www.baldwintitanium.co.uk
www.burls.co.uk
But the next stage wasn't to visit a factory or workshop; it was to go back to the small bike shop where I had bought a Bianchi road bike in an unusual size and had it fitted. I'd always been sceptical up to that point about bike fits but the little two-man business saw that this bike fitted me like a glove. Not only that - people on my next CTC ride here in Northampton commented on how I looked just right.
So I had confidence in this little shop; and you'll know it or, at least, where it is: Windmill Wheels at Wymondham - we had lunch in the café (unattached to the bike shop) on Day 1 of LonJoG. The two young men - Jack and Ally - are also Enigma dealers. First I just examined the Enigma bikes they had in stock and also the Enigma frames which they hadn't built up into bikes yet. Then, because of my unusual body shape, they recommended direct contact with Enigma. They gave me a .pdf drawing of how my Bianchi was set up.
I went to the London Bike Show in February 2015. I was there when the show opened and I was the first customer onto the Enigma stand. Because the Show started slowly, I had Jim Walker (the founder-owner) and Paul Smith (the chief designer) to myself for a long time. If you do go to their factory, I'd recommend getting an appointment with Paul Smith. I found that he and I were on the same wave-length: he tours - and we had been to the same places (Channel to the Med; South to North of Ireland; LeJoG pretty much by the same route and so on). So, as I wanted a bike for "credit-card" touring, he knew exactly what I was talking about. The other thing was that I wanted a horizontal top tube - just a personal thing! And disc brakes - which involve tiny changes in the frame geometry.
By the end of the morning, Paul had produced a first-effort .pdf of dimensions and geometry and given a copy to me and e-mailed a copy to Jack at Windmill Wheels. I visited the shop three times for fittings on their jig so that I was happy, Jack was happy and Paul at Enigma was happy before I paid a deposit and ordered my frame. It had already been decided at the Bike Show that, if I went ahead, the frame would be built by Joe Walker, the owner's son.
Well, I won't bore you with more of the notes I made of the process but I do have pages and pages of documents as Jack and I decided on the rest of the bike.
I was pleasantly surprised that delivery time was matched. Indeed the bike was ready early. Jim Walker had said to expect 100 days from the time I ordered. In fact, it was more like 90. I talked to them at the Bike Show in February and I collected the bike from the shop on 6th July.
Hope this helps in some small way!