B&E

The header shop that welded frames for half a dozen BMX brands and never got its name on one

A Legend Bike Co. builder page · primary source: Bill Ryan

Read this before you read anything else. B&E, formerly Bassett Headers, is not Bassett Bikes, the BMX company Mike Redman started in 1985. Different Bassett. No connection between the two. If you came here looking for Redman's company, it has its own chapter: Bassett Bikes.

At a glance

Also known as Bassett Headers
Location Southern California
Built for S&M, Revcore, White Bear, Brackens Bikes, and the first Supercross BMX frames
Known for Contract frame welding for small brands, working from adjustable fixtures
Status Closed for many years

The header shop that became a frame shop

B&E started out as Bassett Headers, an automotive business making exhaust headers. Headers and bicycle frames are not as far apart as they sound. Both are thin-wall steel tube, cut to length, mitered to fit, held in a fixture and welded. A shop that can bend and join tube for a car can bend and join tube for a bike. At some point Bassett Headers made that jump, changed the name to B&E, and started taking bicycle work.

Mike at B&E built the frames. That is the name I knew him by and the only name I am going to put on this page, because it is the only one I can stand behind. I never had a reason to write down his last name. I was there to talk about frames.

This was normal for the era. A small BMX brand in Southern California in the 1980s and 1990s did not own a factory. It owned a name, a geometry, a decal sheet and a customer list. The welding happened at a shop down the road that also welded for four other brands, and sometimes for people who had nothing to do with bicycles at all. B&E was one of those shops.

Who they built for

By my count, B&E built frames for S&M, Revcore, White Bear, Brackens Bikes, and the first Supercross BMX frames.

That is a real list. Look at what those names went on to mean. S&M became one of the most durable rider-owned brands in the sport. Brackens carried the name of Tommy Brackens, one of the fastest and most watchable racers of his generation. White Bear built the T-Bone. And Supercross is the company I have run for thirty-seven years. The first frames with my name on them came out of that shop.

Published accounts of how S&M got started describe two young riders walking into B&E and asking whether two rear dropouts could be welded together to make them twice as thick. The shop said yes. They had frames made for themselves, other riders wanted the same thing, and a company came out of it. I was not in the room for that conversation, so I am telling you it is the published version and not my own.

Revcore is the one name on the list without its own chapter here yet. Forum records connect Revcore frames to B&E as well.

Adjustable fixtures, and what that cost

Here is the part I was there for.

B&E worked from adjustable fixtures instead of dedicated fixed ones. A frame fixture is the steel jig that holds the head tube, seat tube, bottom bracket and rear end in the right places while they get welded. A dedicated fixture is set once for one frame and one geometry, and it never moves. An adjustable fixture slides and pivots so the same jig can build a twenty-inch race frame in the morning and somebody else's geometry in the afternoon.

For a small contract shop that is the sensible way to do it. One jig, many customers, many geometries, and you are not paying to build and store a separate fixture for every brand that walks in. Nearly every shop of that size and era worked this way, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

But an adjustable fixture has to be reset for every job. Every reset is a chance for a dimension to move. Loosen it, slide it, snug it back down, and you are trusting that the number you set it to is the number it is actually holding. Repeat that across a production run and across weeks of other people's work in between, and you find out what your tolerances really are.

Supercross frames came out to different dimensions. Not one, and not a shrug. They had to be made over. I saw it myself. That is why we moved Supercross production away from B&E, and it happened well before the shop closed. It was not a falling out and it was not a judgment on the man's welding. The welds were fine. The setup could not hold the number often enough for what we needed, and we needed it every time.

Anybody who has run production knows the difference between a shop that can build a good frame and a shop that can build the same good frame two hundred times. Those are two separate skills. Moving to dedicated fixtures is the boring, expensive answer, and it is the right one.

Why this library names this builder

You will notice we do not do this anywhere else. As a standing practice, this library does not publish the names of the factories and contract shops its subjects used. Those relationships were private business arrangements, a lot of them are still live, and the people involved did not sign up to have their customer lists posted on somebody's history site. That practice is not changing.

B&E is a deliberate exception, and I made the call myself. Two reasons. First, I was there. This is not somebody's secret I picked up secondhand and decided to publish. It is my own company's production history, and I watched the work happen. Second, B&E has been closed for many years. There is no business to damage, no live account to expose, and no competitor who learns anything useful from it. What is left is a piece of BMX history that would otherwise disappear entirely, because small contract welders almost never got their names in the magazines.

One exception, for one closed shop, with the owner of this site as the source. Everywhere else in this library, the practice stands. If you are reading another chapter and wondering who welded it, that silence is on purpose.

Not Bassett Bikes

Saying it twice because the record gets this wrong. B&E / Bassett Headers is not Bassett Bikes. Bassett Bikes was Mike Redman's BMX company, started in 1985, and it is a completely separate operation with separate people. The only thing the two share is a surname. If you are chasing a Bassett frame's history, start at Bassett Bikes and do not let the header shop send you down the wrong road.

Where the public record runs thin

Almost everything about B&E is thin, and that is the honest state of it.

I cannot give you Mike's last name. I cannot give you a street address, a founding date for the header business, a date it took its first bicycle job, or a date it closed. I am not going to guess at any of those, and you should be suspicious of anybody who does.

There is no catalog. There is no ad. Contract welders did not advertise, because their customers were the brands, not the riders, and no brand wanted a decal that said who really built the thing. That is the whole reason this history is hard to pin down. A shop can weld frames for five companies over fifteen years and leave behind less paper than a single rider's number plate.

What exists is scattered across collector forum threads, where people who were around at the time compare serial numbers, dropout shapes and weld patterns and argue about who built what. Those threads are useful and they are also unverified memory. Some of them disagree with each other about whether a given Brackens frame came from B&E or from another local builder. I have not tried to settle those arguments here.

If you worked at B&E, ordered from B&E, or have an invoice, a business card, a photograph of the shop or anything else with the name on it, we want to see it. That is how this library gets built.

Where B&E fits in the bigger story

B&E belongs to the layer of BMX that almost nobody writes about: the shops that made the parts, not the brands that sold them. Pro-Fab and VDC sit in that same layer, as does Power Plus Cycles. For every name on a down tube there was a welder nobody interviewed, and when the shop closed the knowledge went with it. Start from the brands and you get half the story. Start from the shops and you find out why frames from three different companies suddenly looked like cousins. The bigger arc is in our History of BMX series.

Sources

Primary source: Bill Ryan, firsthand, 2026. The shop's prior name, the identification of Mike as the builder, the customer list, the use of adjustable fixtures, the out-of-dimension Supercross frames, and the decision to move Supercross production are all Bill Ryan's own account of work he was present for.

Supporting, secondary: BMXmuseum.com forum threads discussing B&E's customers and dates, and the Revcore and Brackens build histories; published S&M founding accounts describing the doubled rear dropout request that started the company.

Notes on uncertainty. Mike's full name is not confirmed and is not stated here. No address, founding date or closing date for B&E or Bassett Headers is confirmed, and none is stated here. Forum accounts place the shop in Orange County, California; we have not independently confirmed the town and have written "Southern California" instead. Collector accounts disagree over whether particular Brackens frames were welded at B&E or at another local shop, and that disagreement is left open. The S&M founding story is reported from published accounts, not from Bill Ryan's own presence. Everything Bill Ryan witnessed is marked as such in the text. If you can correct or document any of it, send it in.