The frame is here, the wheels are built, and the cranks are on. Unfortunately, it’s going to stay in that state for somewhere between the next 2 days and 1.5 weeks.

There were a couple snafus with the components arriving correctly, hence the partially built bike. The two that are stopping the show right now are a SRAM I-motion 9 shifter and the fork. Bikeman.com somehow didn’t get the fork in the box with the frame, so they’re sending it out, and AZ Bikes forgot to order the shifter for my internal hub, so that’s on its way as well.

Here’s what the final build list is shaping up as:
Frame and Fork: Surly Big Dummy
Front Wheel: Surly Bolt-on 25h Disc Hub laced to a Sun Rhino Lite XL rim
Rear Wheel: SRAM I-motion 9 Internally Geared Hub (20 tooth cog) laced to a Sun Rhino Lite XL rim
Crankset: Shimano LX converted to 32 tooth singlespeed (replaced big ring with bash guard to help save my pants)
Stem/Seatpost: Ritchey Comp
Handlebar: Surly Torsion Bar
Brakes: Avid BB7 Road brakes with Cane Creek flat top levers
Headset: Cane Creek S8
Tires: Kenda K-rad 2.3” (rear), Geax Mezcal 2.1” (front)
Seat: Unknown GT seat

As you can see, there are a few new parts and a few used or somehow acquired parts (like the mismatched tires and the handlebars). Should be pretty nice

One of the ‘newer’ items for me is the internally geared hub. As we all know by now, I’m pretty adverse to gears in most situations, but I decided if I’m using the big dummy to it’s full 400 lb capacity, gears may be useful essential. As I’m still a fan of the singlespeed look, the internally geared hub was the obvious option.

As part of my research into hub options, I did a little calculating on where I would end up with a gear ratio range so I could pick my front ring size appropriately. I assumed that the wheel and crank size were the same as a mountain bike (which they are, so it’s not so much of an assumption as an observation). So, to compare the i-motion hub to a moutain drivetrain, we can simply look at the gear ratios.

If we take for a quick example a 11-32 rear mountain cassette with a 22-32-44 crankset on the front, the easiest gear ratio is 0.69 (22-32), and the hardest is 4.00 (44-11).

Turns out that the i-motion 9 hub has a lower gear ratio (just from the hub) of .542 and an upper of 1.844. This is just the gearing in the hub, so you have to multiply this by whatever gear ratio I choose for the ‘singlespeed’ drivetrain which will push the hub. The hub comes with a 20 tooth ring on the back, so I looked at 32 and 34 tooth front rings. The 32 gives a range of 0.87 (1.6×0.542) to 2.95 (1.6×1.844). The 34 is a little harder, but not far off, with a range of 0.92 to 3.13 (the 1.6 changes to 1.7).

In the end I ended up with the 32 tooth since I’m planning on needing to haul some weight with this bike. That puts my final gearset at the following theoretical range:

I-9 Gear Ratios	Effective Ratios
1.844	2.95
1.611	2.58
1.375	2.20
1.172	1.88
1	1.60
0.853	1.36
0.727	1.16
0.621	0.99
0.542	0.87

Hopefully that’ll get me up the hills and still allow some high speed cruising.

As most of you probably had guessed, I not only enjoy typing little gems of semi-worthless knowledge on this site, but I also enjoy doing a little data mining on some of the statistics every now and again.

So, this evening, we’re going to take a little trip into the statistics of HandlebarSandwich.com and see what we can dig up. I monitor the statistics of the site pretty regularly, but I figured that some of you may be wondering to yourselves “am I the only one who reads this stuff?”. Stay tuned, I’ll give you more than you ever wanted to know about your fellow visitors. . .

Tools of the Trade
The first item of business is the “how” for the stats. I primarily use 3 different tools to track stats on the site. The first is Google Analytics. This is where I get all the general visitor information including where people come from, how long they spend on the site, what they look at, etc. etc. The second is Feedburner. This is very specific to those of you visiting through a RSS reader, and tracks all the feeds coming in and out of the site. The final one that I like to check is Technorati. Technorati allows me to see who is linking here from other blogs. It gives a nice little list of who is quoting me and tells other blog users that I quoted them.

Note: Unless I state otherwise, I’m going to be running down the stats from January 1, 2008 to May 4, 2008.

Who?
The first and foremost question always comes down to “How many people visit your site?”.

According to Google, since 1-1-08, I’ve had 5,898 visits, which comes out to an average of 46.81 visits a day. This is a little bit skewed because it doesn’t count the people who check my site through an rss reader and don’t click through to the post. On the average, I have 42 people following the site through a RSS reader.

As we dig a bit further into the google data, I took a look at the overall graph of visitors, which looks something like this:

As you can see there is definitely a repeating pattern to the data, so I got a bit curious and decided to download the raw data and do a bit of digging. I plotted the number of visitors by day of the week and got a chart like this:

It certainly looks like a pattern. Turns out that the averages come out looking like this:
Monday – 60.3
Tuesday – 55.8
Wednesday – 52.1
Thursday – 50.5
Friday – 40.9
Sunday – 39.2
Saturday – 26.4

I’m happy to see that everyone gets the monday blues and reads my site. I’m also happy to see that people are out doing something other than staring at a computer over the weekend.

Geek Extra Credit: Not quite satisfied with just looking at the numbers, I dumped all the data into a statistics program that I use for work (JMP) and ran an ANOVA to see if there was a statistically significant difference. For those of you who are actually still with me on the extra credit, the p-value of the ANOVA was <0.0001. A Tukey-Kramer analysis yielded the following chart, showing which days were statistically similar (if they share the same letter, they are similar), and which ones were statistically different.

After digging into the weekday phenomenon, it only follows that time of day should also make a difference. So, here it is:

Where?
Where means two things to me. First, where are you physically, and second, where did you come from to get to my site.

As far as physical location, you can imagine that the majority of you guys are from the US. Here’s the breakdown of the top 5 countries with number of visits since january 1:
US - 5654
UK - 48
Canada – 46
Germany – 23
Japan – 14

After that, it’s also no surprise that the majority of you read from Arizona, although some other places are picking up steam:
Arizona – 2209
Colorado – 704
New Mexico – 366
California – 281
Indiana – 227

Next is another important question, where did you come from on the internet. Again, no surprise that the majority are direct requests, but the new frontrunner of late is Mr. Gnome himself from onespeeder.com. If you had checked this list about a month ago, Big Johnny was in the lead without contest, and now a lot of you are linking over from Onespeeder.com and tRoy’s site at epicrider.com. Very interesting. . .
(Direct Request) – 2305
Google – 626
Onespeeder.com – 489
Drunkcyclist.com – 480
juniper-solutions.com (which covers tRoy and dara) – 396
Forty15.com – 160

Keywords
I am always amused as to what people search for to find my site, and this definitely gets one of the ‘most surprising’ awards.
“handlebar sandwich” – 168
“handbar sandwich” – 50
“fixed gear handlebars” – 14
“fkr, kevin rice” – 12
“surly big dummy” – 11

Yes, you read that correctly. I had 12 people find my site from a search for “fkr, kevin rice”. In fact, if you go to the google homepage, type in “fkr, kevin rice” (no quotes) and hit “I’m feeling Lucky” you will end up right back here. Bitchin.

Pages
So what are people looking at the most? Obviously, the main page gets the most views by far, but since january 1, here are some more top pages:
Gallery – Sedona Circ 2008
Steep and Cheap, a love-hate Relationship
Soapbox – Customer Service 101
Thinking about a Big Dummy
Gallery – Winter Pursuits
RIP Sheldon Brown

That was from google analytics, if we go in from feedburner, we get an idea of what people are clicking through to from the RSS feeds:
Getting off my ass – part 2
Road Ride and a Training Confession
Road Trip
Win Free Stuff or Buy Cool Shirts
Regaining Motivation

It’s really interesting that people click through to different posts from a feedreader versus on the site. Not sure exactly what to make of that.

Final Thoughts
That’s about all I have from the stats for the site. There are more out there to look through, but I think those are kinda the most interesting and telling ones.

The only other one I will point out is my technorati “authority” score. This is a measure of how many people link to your site from other blogs. Right now I’m hovering around 12. To give you a basis for comparison, onespeeder.com is at 8, drunkcyclist.com is at 98, fatcyclist.com comes in at 293, and bike snob NYC comes in at a whopping 542.

Finally I have one more bit of geek extra credit. We got a demo on the new version of JMP at work the other day, and it has this feature called “animated bubble plots”. Basically, it allows you to visualize how data changes over time. The instructor joked that he didn’t know what you would use it for, and so I aim to prove him wrong.

There are several things going on on this plot, and here’s what they all mean:

• the x-axis is day of the week
• the y-axis is number of visits per day
• the size of the bubbles represents the average amount of time spent on the site on that day
• the color of the bubbles represents how many pages, on average, a person viewed when they visited the site that day (red is more than blue)
• the time factor is displaying weeks of the year since January 1

It’s easiest to run through the video and focus on one or two things at a time, which can help to see the different relationships between the factors.

My head hurts.

Courtesy of the barista at Late for the Train.
Sometimes I feel bad drinking it, but seeing as the sides are already beginning to dissolve, I better drink up and jump start the morning.

All that money I’m spending on building up a big dummy when this is out there. . .

Courtesy of Frank:

here is alternative to the big dummy and its a Huffy!

It got a little chilly again here in flag. Not exactly cold, mind you, but cold enough that the flowers and bushes I just planted in the front bed are going to be a pain in the ass because I gotta drag some fabric over them to keep them from freezing. Par for the course, I guess.

Luckily the 6 hop rhizomes in the back bed against the fence should do just fine since the ground hasn’t been frozen for a while. Hop shortage my ass, I got beer to brew!

The chill in the air was also just in time for the first concert of the year at the Pine Mountain Amphitheater. The show in question? Dierks Bentley.

Never heard of him? Then you’re not a country music fan. I, on the other hand, am a closet country music fan.

Alright, sometimes it’s not that ‘closet’. How can you not love songs like What was I Thinkin, Chattahoochee, or The Watermelon Crawl.

Earlier in life an intense hatred of country music was instilled in me via 45-minute each direction school bus rides with nothing but country music. Alas, when I got to college, I realized that I missed a little bit of that midwest heritage. Plus I knew all the words to almost every country song that came my way. A mixed blessing, to be sure.

Whatever the vice may be, I enjoyed the concert tonight, despite the cold. I came prepared with a blanket and some rowdy friends, and we had a blast. I highly recommend it.

Finally, I took a look tonight at the courses for the MBAA finals up here in flagstaff. I’m glad to see that they’re using some nice trails, but a bit disappointed in the length and trail selection for the marathon course (not really anything new). Too much forest road in my opinion (and really, is 30 miles a ‘marathon’ race?)

Unfortunately I’m not going to be in town that weekend, or I’d definitely go try to steal some points on my home turf.

With the economic stimulus checks right around the corner, and my birthday in less than a month, I decided that an early birthday present was in order.

So, on monday I marched into AZ Bikes with a build list of components which began with 18 inch Surly Big Dummy Frameset. On tuesday I got a call from Adam asking to stop by and clarify a couple of the components because he was putting in the order. I stopped by, and we started punching numbers into the QBP website for the components I was looking for.

That was when crisis hit. Quality was out of every Big Dummy frameset excepting only the 16”.

I sent an email to Surly today, which Emily kindly (and quickly) responded to:

Hi Nathan,
You’re right, we’re all out. We’ve got 16” frames in stock but that’s it. The other sizes will be here in August. It stinks. I hope you can wait. Please do let us know if you have any other questions.
Thanks!
Emily
Surly Bikes

OH NO!

I, in fact, could not wait. As you may have guessed, even though I haven’t been verbalizing my desire beyond the initial post a month ago, the idea had been rattling around in my brain since that day.

I frantically spent my lunch hour calling different online shops looking for a frame. Everyone had the same story. The 16” frame was the only one to be found (and some places were even out of that).

Finally, I struck gold. A little shop by the name of bikeman.com came through. I called them up and somebody actually ran around looking at boxes making absolutely sure they had a frame in an 18. I pulled out my credit card and bought what could have possibly been one of the last 18” Big Dummy frames for sale until august.

I’m incredibly excited about the prospect of the frame arriving sometime next week. We got the remainder of the parts ordered from AZ Bikes today, so it all should be coming together the beginning of next week.

Stay tuned. . . .