BMX Racing History · Legend Bike Co

Dyno BMX — The Brand Bob Morales Built, and GT Bought

Most BMX brands start with a frame. Dyno started with a sticker, a jersey, and a kid who'd been hustling product since he was thirteen. By the time it had a bike of its own to sell, it didn't belong to that kid anymore — it belonged to GT. But the look stayed his. That bent top tube, the chrome, the loud paint. That was all Bob Morales. Here's the whole thing.

The kid who sold stickers

To understand Dyno you have to understand Bob Morales, because for the first three years they were the same thing. Morales grew up racing BMX in Southern California in the mid-'70s, and he was working part-time at BMX Action magazine before he could legally drive — his best friend was R.L. Osborn, whose dad ran the magazine. So he was inside the sport, at the center of it, while it was still being invented.

He started a business at thirteen. Called it Sticker Factory, sold stickers at the races. Couldn't drive yet, so he ran his stock around on a moped with a briefcase full of product. By the late '70s the sticker thing had grown into T-shirts and accessories and a new name — Bob Morales Enterprises, BME. The kid was a businessman before he was out of high school.

Along the way he became the first member of the Haro freestyle team, touring the country doing trick shows with Bob Haro, and he had a hand in designing the very first purpose-built freestyle frame, the Haro Freestyler. That world — the early freestyle world, the skatepark world — is the world Dyno was born into. Not racing. Freestyle.

1982 — Dyno Design

In 1982, Morales added his own brand of soft goods to the BME catalog and gave it a name: Dyno Design. First product line was BMX jerseys, racing pants, and T-shirts. That same year BME and Dyno set up at the first Interbike trade show in Las Vegas, and Morales — still a teenager — became the youngest company owner ever to exhibit at a bicycle industry show. June of '82 he graduated high school and went full-time on the business.

So that's the founding date you'll see everywhere, and it's right: 1982. But notice what Dyno was. It was apparel. Number plates, jerseys, the stuff a freestyle kid wore and bolted on, not the bike underneath him. Dyno didn't build a single frame for the first three years it existed. That part came later, and it came with a buyer attached.

Two patents for somebody else's bike

1983, Morales and his riding partner Eddie Fiola finished a deal with Kuwahara and signed with GT. The two of them designed GT's first freestyle frame and named it the Performer. GT's own ads gave them the credit — "designed by professional freestylers, Eddie Fiola and Bob Morales" — and the design earned two patents that went to GT. The Performer went on to be one of the best-selling freestyle bikes of the decade.

Hold onto that, because it matters. Before GT ever owned Dyno, the guy who owned Dyno was already designing GT's most important freestyle bike and riding for the team. The two companies were tangled together for years before any money changed hands. When the sale finally happened, it wasn't strangers doing a deal. It was a designer selling to the company he already worked for.

1985 — GT buys Dyno

By 1985 Dyno was growing but broke. Morales was running it, running his freestyle contest organization the AFA, and the whole thing was undercapitalized. Then GT made an offer for Dyno. Morales took it. His words, years later, are about as plain as it gets:

"GT Bicycles made an offer to buy Dyno. I accepted their offer because Dyno was severely undercapitalized and in need of investment. I negotiated a contract with GT to design bicycle frames and components and to consult on a marketing strategy for them."

It was a good deal for a guy who needed cash to keep going. GT got a brand with real freestyle credibility and the designer who built it. Morales got investment, a design contract, and — this was part of the deal — permission to keep running his AFA freestyle series on the side. He stayed on, designing for GT and Dyno both. He worked there through 1986 and left to run the AFA full-time in 1987, though he kept consulting for a while after. So the man who started Dyno was hands-on with it for only about two years after the sale. Short window. Big fingerprints.

The Compe and the bent top tube

The first real Dyno bike was the 1985 Compe, and the story of how it got its shape is one of the better ones in BMX. Morales tells it himself: after the sale, GT asked him to design a new freestyle frame. The very first prototype was hand-built by Gary Turner — GT's founder, the welder — out of GT frame components and tubing. Morales tested it and decided it wasn't different enough. It looked too much like everything else. So he had them put a bend in the top tube where it meets the seat-stay platform, partly for clearance, mostly to give the bike a face of its own.

That bend is the Dyno. Forty years later, a Dyno Compe is one of the most collected freestyle bikes of the era, and that kinked top tube is the first thing anybody points at. Chrome frame, bold paint, that bend. Morales took a frame Gary Turner welded and made it unmistakably not a GT.

The chrome years — Compe, VFR, Detour, Slammer

With GT's money and factory behind it, Dyno turned into a proper bike line through the late '80s and into the '90s. It sat under the GT umbrella as the freestyle-flavored, value-priced cousin — a little flashier, a little cheaper, aimed at the kid who wanted a freestyle bike that looked the part without paying GT money.

The model names became their own language for anybody who was a kid in those years. The Compe up top. The D-30. The Detour. The VFR. The Slammer. The Air, the NSX, the Blaze. Chrome was the signature finish — a Dyno you remember is almost always a chrome one, dressed up with loud decals and colored parts. They weren't the lightest race weapons on the track. They were the bikes that looked the best leaned against a wall, and there were a lot of them. Dyno did real volume. To this day the brand reportedly threw off tens of millions a year in sales for GT.

It ran a freestyle team and a tour, too — the Dyno freestyle tour was a real thing in the late '80s, putting on shows the way Morales had done it himself a decade earlier. Riders who carried Dyno colors over the years included freestylers like Dave Voelker and the tour rider Dino Deluca. Morales' old partner Eddie Fiola is tied to the brand's early identity as well.

Where the name went

Dyno's fate is the same fate as its parent's, because by then they were the same company. GT went public, got huge, and then unraveled after co-founder Richard Long died in 1996. GT ended up under Schwinn, and in 2001 the combined Schwinn/GT operation went bankrupt. Pacific Cycle bought the brands out of bankruptcy court that year, Dyno included, and kept selling Dyno bikes as an entry-level line. Then Dorel Industries bought Pacific Cycle in 2004.

Same ownership chain GT rode through, all the way down. And like a lot of brands that get bought and rebought, Dyno slowly faded out as a name anybody was building a real bike under. There are Dyno listings on the books well into recent years, but the brand that mattered — the chrome freestyle brand, the Morales-designed brand — belongs to one specific stretch. 1985 to the mid-'90s, give or take.

What we don't know

A few honest gaps. The exact 1985 sale terms and price between Morales and GT aren't public anywhere reliable — Morales has described why he sold and what he kept, but not the number. The precise full race-team and freestyle-team rosters across Dyno's whole run are scattered across catalogs and memory; we've named the riders we can stand behind and left it there. And one secondary brand profile lists racers Greg Hill and Gary Ellis on Dyno's side — we couldn't confirm that against a primary source, so treat it as unverified. When the archives and photos fill in, this page gets updated.

Timeline

• 1975–78 Bob Morales races BMX, works at BMX Action, starts Sticker Factory at age 13.
• 1980 Joins the Haro freestyle team as its first member; helps design the Haro Freestyler.
• 1982 Launches Dyno Design inside BME — jerseys, racing pants, T-shirts, number plates.
• 1983 With Eddie Fiola, designs GT's first freestyle frame, the Performer.
• 1985 GT buys Dyno. Morales stays on under contract. The Dyno Compe — first Dyno frame — launches.
• 1986–87 Morales designs for Dyno/GT, then leaves to run the AFA full-time; keeps consulting.
• late '80s–'90s Dyno runs as a GT house brand — Compe, D-30, Detour, VFR, Slammer, Air, NSX.
• 2001 Schwinn/GT bankruptcy; Pacific Cycle buys the brands, Dyno included.
• 2004 Dorel Industries acquires Pacific Cycle.