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Hank & Frank Bicycles

The FORCE Frame from Oakland, California

Some shops built their own frame from scratch. Some bought overstock off a factory floor and welded on a gusset. Hank & Frank did neither — they went to a New Jersey rocket-car outfit that also happened to build BMX frames, and had one built to their own name. The result was the FORCE, a shop-team race frame that barely left the Bay Area and is now a name collectors trade quietly among themselves.

The shop

Hank & Frank Bicycle traces back to 1925, a Bay Area shop that has stayed in the same family's hands for more than fifty years. It runs two stores today — one in Oakland, one on Mount Diablo Boulevard in Lafayette, California — and by its own account has always leaned on sponsoring local races and community rides. In the BMX boom of the late 1970s, that meant fielding a race team.

The Hank & Frank team rode alongside a second local outfit, Silver Shield, on the same frame. Hank & Frank later bought Silver Shield out — a detail that comes from a BMXmuseum.com forum member whose uncle raced for both teams in the 1970s for Sunshine BMX and the shop Bike In The Box. It is shop-level history, recorded secondhand by somebody who was actually there, and it lines up with everything else known about how these small Bay Area outfits operated.

The FORCE, Force 1 and Force 2

The house frame was called the FORCE. Documented survivors run from 1977 through 1981 in two versions: the Force 1 (1977 to 1979) and the Force 2 (1978 to 1981), both built in chromoly. One surviving Force 2 was described by the friend of its original owner as the team's practice bike, fitted with a Tuf-Neck gooseneck and a Phil Wood front sprocket — ordinary, well-used shop-team equipment, not showroom bikes.

A two-page test of the Force 2 reportedly ran in BMX Plus! in August 1981, per a collector who has a copy — that issue was not located on oldschoolmags.com for this page, so the test itself has not been independently read, and its content is not represented here as confirmed. How many FORCE frames were built isn't documented anywhere found for this page. Call that an open question rather than a guess.

Built by Speed Unlimited

Here's the piece that turns a shop-team frame into part of a bigger story. Bill Ryan's firsthand account places the FORCE's manufacture with Speed Unlimited, the Wayne, New Jersey company behind the Thruster BMX brand (Bill Ryan, firsthand, 2026). That is not just a memory standing alone. A separate, independently maintained history of the Thruster brand states plainly that Speed Unlimited "made bikes it appears for Puch, Swoopco (small Indiana company) and Hank & Frank (Oakland, CA bike shop and team)" — naming Hank & Frank by name, unprompted, years before this page existed.

One honest caveat belongs here. Speed Unlimited's own most detailed company history — written by Ron Vigneri, who worked there and posted it specifically to correct errors in the account above — names Hutch and Puch as Speed Unlimited's documented contract clients, and does not itself mention Hank & Frank. That doesn't contradict the FORCE connection; it just means the fullest insider account of the company doesn't happen to repeat it. Between Bill Ryan's firsthand attribution and the independent Thruster history that names Hank & Frank directly, the contract-build story stands on more than memory alone — it just isn't confirmed by every source that could confirm it.

Similar frame, similar arrangement, similar era: on the other side of the country, Wheels N' Things in El Cajon, California had its WT Racer built the same way — a shop with a team to outfit, and a manufacturer willing to build to the shop's own name. Neither was a rebadge job. Both were purpose-built contract frames, which puts the FORCE and the WT Racer in a different category from something like the Hustler, where at least some frames started life as another brand's overstock with a shop gusset welded on.

Where Hank & Frank sits in the story

Hank & Frank was never a national name. It didn't run full-page ads in BMX Action or chase a factory team across the country. What it did was ordinary and important at the same time — a neighborhood shop that wanted its own frame for its own kids and found a builder who could deliver it. That's the same pattern covered in The Bike Shops That Made BMX, and it sits alongside the contract-manufacturer story told on Voris Dixon Bikes — a different builder, a different coast, the same basic arrangement between a shop and the factory that actually welded the tubes.

Hank & Frank is still in business today, still family-run, still on the same stretch of the Bay Area it's served for a century. The FORCE was one small chapter in that run — a shop-team race frame that only exists now in a handful of collections and one grainy magazine test nobody's fully read yet.

← Part of The History of BMX

Sources

BMXmuseum.com — Hank & Frank Bicycles brand page (bmxmuseum.com/bikes/hank_frank_bicycles), including the shop's own history and current Oakland and Lafayette store listings; BMXmuseum.com Forums, "1978 Hank & Frank Force 2" (viewtopic.php?id=168464), for the Silver Shield team detail and the referenced August 1981 BMX Plus! Force 2 test (not independently located or read for this page). Thrusterbmx.wordpress.com, "History of Thruster," for the independent identification of Hank & Frank as a Speed Unlimited contract client. BMXmuseum.com Reference 3844, "Thruster & Speed Unlimited by Ron Vigneri," for the company's own most detailed account, which documents Hutch and Puch contracts but does not itself repeat the Hank & Frank detail. Oldschoolmags.com and bmxsociety.com were checked for period Hank & Frank / FORCE material; no readable period test beyond the referenced 1981 BMX Plus! issue was located. Bill Ryan, firsthand, 2026 — the FORCE's manufacture by Speed Unlimited / Thruster.