With the “economic stimulus checks”:http://www.irs.gov/irs/article/0,,id=177937,00.html 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”:http://www.surlybikes.com/bigdummy.html. 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”:http://www.qbp.com/ 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”:http://www.handlebarsandwich.com/04/01/2008/thinking-about-a-big-dummy/, 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”:http://www.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. . . .