Grab On — The Walla Walla Foam Grip That Dated a Whole Era of BMX

Legend Bike Co · BMX heritage series

Look at a BMX bike in a photograph and the foam grips will tell you roughly what year you are looking at before anything else does. Fat, matte, slightly furry at the edges, usually a color that has faded past the point of naming — that is the late 1970s and the very early 1980s, and more often than not it is Grab On. The grips came from Walla Walla, Washington, from a company that had figured out how to grind extruded foam rubber into something you could hold onto, and for about five years they were everywhere in BMX advertising. Then they were gone. And in the 2020s, unexpectedly, they came back.

1973 or 1976? Both, and here is why

Grab On's own website contradicts itself inside a single page load. The body copy says "Quality Since 1973" and states the grips were first developed in 1973. The same page's meta description says the company has been making quality foam grips since 1976. The federal trademark record gives first use of the GRAB ON mark, anywhere and in commerce, as July 2, 1976. The company's own social media handle is grabon1976.

The reading that fits everything is that 1973 is when the foam and the grinding process were developed, and 1976 is when a product went on sale under the name. We are writing it that way rather than picking a year and pretending the other one does not exist.

What the grip actually was

The technical achievement was not the foam. It was the process for rapidly grinding extruded foam rubber to a usable shape and tolerance. Foam damps vibration and impact in a way that molded rubber does not, and it is soft on the hands over a long day, which is why the same material ended up on motorcycles, bicycles and lawn equipment alike.

On which came first — bikes or motorcycles — the company gives two answers. Its About page says the product started as a comfortable bicycle grip. Its longer-form account is more specific: the first grips were for ten-speed bicycles, then BMX and motorcycle, then industrial original equipment. Against that sits a widely repeated marketing line about being the first company in the world to manufacture foam motorcycle grips. Both come from the company. Neither is independently corroborated. Treat "first foam grip maker" as a claim rather than a settled fact, and note that the firm's own detailed telling puts bicycles first.

MX-1, MX-2, MX-3

Three BMX models, and the engineering changes between them are the interesting part.

The MX-1 was the original: all foam, no core. Simple, light, and — the company now freely admits — not durable. The foam of the day tore easily.

The MX-2 and MX-3 answered that with an injection-molded plastic core wearing a foam rubber sleeve. That splits the job in two: a hard cartridge clamps to the bar and takes the abuse, a soft sleeve does the hand contact and can be replaced when it goes. MX-2 sleeves came in three densities — Comp I (standard, hard and durable), Comp II (thicker and softer) and Comp III (thick and firm, patterned on the MX-1) — with replacement end cartridges sold separately as Stubbies.

Durability stayed the defining complaint. Collectors buying new-old-stock pairs today report them tearing across the thin foam section even when they have never been ridden, and at least one owner rebuilt a set by grafting cut-down A'ME ends onto the yellow Grab On cores. Foam did not age well. That is part of why period-correct pairs are hard to find now.

Five years in the magazines

The advertising run is the best-documented part of Grab On's BMX story, and it is dense. The MX-1 got a new-product review in BMX Action in December 1977 — the earliest BMX press we located. An MX-1 advertisement ran in the same title in August 1978. In December 1978 the grips appeared both in an Everything Bicycles dealer advertisement and in the magazine's own BMX Equipment Buyer's Guide. BMX Plus! ran a new-product review in January 1979 and carried a racing-grips campaign across December 1978 and January 1979.

Then it gets fun. In May 1979 Grab On ran an advertisement in BMX Action built around Bobby Encinas winning his number-one plate. From June through October 1979 the company ran a comic-strip campaign in the same title — Episodes of the GRAB On Kid — which is about as 1979 as advertising gets. By that October the grips were stocked in Spencer's Worldwide BMX mail-order pages.

The MX-2 shows up in a BMX Plus! advertisement in June 1981, and the MX-3 in a BMX Action advertisement in May 1982. Those two dates are the hard anchors for the cored grips. Secondary seller sources place the MX-1 at 1977, the MX-2 at early 1980 and the MX-3 at late 1981, and a collector reference entry dates the MX-2 to a 1977 to 1981 window that cannot be reconciled with the others. None of those are period documents. The advertisements are.

On the gate — the honest answer

We found no bike test that lists Grab On as stock equipment. Three period spec panels were read directly from magazine scans, all inside the core Grab On window, all negative:

• The Mongoose Supergoose, BMX Action, September 1979 — Winner's Circle plastic grips.
• The SE Racing Quad-Angle, BMX Action, June 1980 — Oakley originals.
• The Torker MaxFlyte, BMX Action, December 1980 — no boxed spec list, but the body text records Torker telling the testers that the new Oakley .5 grips were going on the bike as soon as they were available, and the testers panning what was on it.

What that pattern suggests — and it is a suggestion, not a proof — is that on serious race completes in 1979 to 1981 the factory default was Oakley, and Grab On lived in the aftermarket, sold hard through magazine advertising, mail order and dealer pages. That is the same shape of business ODI ran with the Mushroom in the same years. Foam grips were a rider's choice, not a factory fitment. Which, if you think about what it means to have chosen them, is a better thing for a grip to be.

Three tests is a small sample, and we will not pretend otherwise. The relevant archive holds roughly 350 dated bike tests, all image-only scans with no searchable text, and the renderer cut us off after three. Anyone who works through the 1978 to 1983 window by eye will settle this properly.

Who else was selling foam

The direct rival was Johar of California and its Rad Grip, which took a full page in BMX Action in December 1980 — copyright 1980, shot with a rider in an SE Racing jersey. There is a nice ending to that: Grab On's current catalog includes the Johar line. The old foam competitor's name now sits inside Grab On's own product list.

In the same December 1980 issue, OGK — Osaka Grip Manufacturing — advertised a non-slip BMX grip, part number 77-17AR, one more Japanese supplier arriving in the American market.

One correction worth making, because it gets repeated: Oakley's BMX grips were rubber, not foam. Oakley was Grab On's competitor for the handlebar. It was not a foam-grip competitor. The two categories should not be lumped together.

Riders

Grab On names Bob Haro, Greg Hill and Bobby Encinas among its sponsored riders. Encinas is the one we can corroborate independently, through that May 1979 BMX Action advertisement celebrating his number-one plate. The Haro and Hill connections are company statements we could not confirm in period print, and we are marking them as such rather than repeating them as documented fact.

The comeback

Grab On's own account is that the BMX grips sold well through the 1970s, the 1980s and into the 1990s, and that by the early 2000s the market had dried up to the point where production was shut down.

When enthusiast demand came back, the company had a problem: no original grips left to copy, and a new injection mold costs somewhere around $15,000. So it went into its own archives and found drawings for an MX-3 variant that never reached production — a grip designed in the era and then shelved. That became the MX-3 NG, built by 3D printing in thermoplastic polyurethane. The company says it is larger and more durable than the original, does not get sticky in heat, and takes replacement sleeves.

They also say research and development has since acquired an original pair each of the MX-2 and MX-3, and has bought injection-molding machines for well under half the cost of new molds, with original-style reissues expected. An MX-4 has been hinted at.

One figure to treat carefully: the company states original MX-1, MX-2 and MX-3 pairs can fetch as much as $500 a pair. The one completed collector sale we could verify was a new-old-stock MX-1 pair at $90, sold in May 2025. Attribute the higher number to the company, not to the market.

Timeline

• 1973 Foam grip developed, per the company's own account — a process for rapidly grinding extruded foam rubber.
• 1976 First use of the GRAB ON mark in commerce, July 2, per the federal trademark filing.
• 1977 MX-1 reaches BMX. New-product review in BMX Action, December.
• 1978 MX-1 advertisement in BMX Action, August. Everything Bicycles dealer advertisement and BMX Equipment Buyer's Guide listing, December.
• 1979 New-product review in BMX Plus!, January. Bobby Encinas number-one plate advertisement in BMX Action, May. The Episodes of the GRAB On Kid comic campaign runs June to October. Stocked in Spencer's Worldwide mail order by October.
• 1980 Johar of California's Rad Grip and OGK's BMX grip advertise in BMX Action, December — the foam market has company.
• 1981 MX-2 advertisement in BMX Plus!, June. The cored grip with the replaceable sleeve.
• 1982 MX-3 advertisement in BMX Action, May.
• 1988 The current GRAB ON trademark registers, September 13, for flexible cellular rubber pads and grips.
• Early 2000s BMX grip production shut down as the market dries up, per the company.
• ~2024 The MX-3 NG launches — an unproduced 1980s design, recovered from the archives and 3D printed in thermoplastic polyurethane.
• Today Grab On Grips, LLC operates from Walla Walla under Marty Comstock and Dave Dressler, making OEM foam, bulk foam tubing, motorcycle and bicycle grips, the Johar line, and BMX grips once more.

Sources

grabongrips.com — About Us: the 1973 development claim, the conflicting 1976 meta line, the grinding process, current ownership and the Johar line. bmxgrip.com — the company's own BMX history page: MX-1 as all-foam, MX-2 and MX-3 as cored designs, the durability admission, the named sponsored riders, the early-2000s shutdown, and the full MX-3 NG development account. Period magazines via the oldschoolmags.com scan archive: BMX Action, September 1979 (Mongoose Supergoose test spec panel); BMX Action, June 1980 (SE Racing Quad-Angle test spec panel); BMX Action, December 1980 (Torker MaxFlyte test, plus the Johar Rad Grip and OGK advertisements in the same issue). oldschool-bmx-parts.blogspot.com, reproducing period scans credited to Old School Mags — the MX-1 advertising and review chronology from December 1977 through October 1979, the MX-2 June 1981 advertisement, and the Comp I, Comp II and Comp III sleeve range. bmxmuseum.com — reference entries for the MX-2 and MX-3 grips, the May 1982 BMX Action MX-3 advertisement, the January 2019 forum thread on new-old-stock durability, and a completed sale record for a new-old-stock MX-1 pair at $90 in May 2025. Federal trademark records for GRAB ON, Reg. 1503915 (live, Grab On Grips, LLC) and the cancelled 1981 registration — read from search summaries rather than at source, because the database is behind a bot wall; re-verify at USPTO before quoting. Attempted and unavailable: bmxsociety.com (unreachable on every protocol and subdomain), 23mag.com (no Grab On entry exists), oldschoolmags.com bike-test PDFs beyond the three read visually (image-only scans, renderer rate-limited).

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