A BMXRacingHistory.com chapter · hosted on Legend Bike Co

Hi-Tech BMX

The Story of the Frame I Built at 13 — 1982 to 1984

By Bill Ryan · Founder of Supercross BMX · Designer of the Hi-Tech BMX frame, featured in BMX Plus! January 1984 (age 14) · Designer of 8x Bike of the Year race frames · 45 years building BMX frames

This chapter is different from the others on this site. Hi-Tech BMX is mine. I was 13 when we started it and 15 when I shut it down. 25 frames, a magazine feature, a naming-conflict phone call, and a design that walked over to another brand and lived on. The facts here are mine first-hand, with the magazine scan and the Voris Dixon interview record to back them up.

How it started — 1982, age 13

By spring of 1982 I had already been around the industry for a year. I was 13, working part-time at SE Racing on Paramount Blvd. I had cracked three Torker frames as a co-sponsored rider, and Larry Elliott's dad Ry had taught me to weld at Certified Metal Products earlier that year. The first frame I ever built was an unbranded one, rattle-can white, built off Ry's argon tank at 6 a.m. before school. I still own it. It never cracked.

The second frame — or really the second run of frames — is what became Hi-Tech.

Randy Rizzo introduced me to Voris Dixon sometime that year. Voris was already running the Voris Dixon Company (VDC) out of Anaheim, building frames and parts under his own name and on contract for half a dozen other brands. He had the welding rigs, the tubing, and the production setup. I had a frame design and a name I was proud of. We agreed to build a run of 25.

The brand operated out of my bedroom at 6912 Tahiti Drive, Cypress, California 90630. That was the office, the warehouse, and the art department. I did the decals by hand — single-color, hand-cut. 25 frames did not justify a printed decal run.

Why we called it Hi-Tech

The name came from the frame design. For 1982 it was advanced — that was the word we used at the time, and Hi-Tech was the badge that fit. The details that earned the name:

• A pierced-and-cut-short seat mast. The seat tube passed through the top tube junction rather than dead-ending into it. Cleaner load path, stiffer junction.
• A welded-on seat post clamp. Same idea JMC was running — integrate the clamp into the frame rather than running a separate aftermarket clamp. Cleaner look, one less part to lose.
• Dropouts welded inside and outside. Most builders welded the dropout to the outside of the stay only. We welded both sides, which gave the rear end a much stiffer load transfer at the axle.
• 1-3/8" down tube paired with a 1-1/4" top tube. One of the first BMX frames to run that combination. Bigger down tube where the load is, smaller top tube where it is not. That tube-pair pattern became standard on race frames for the next 40 years — it is still on every Supercross aluminum and cro-mo frame I have designed since 1989.

None of those details were wild for a custom motorcycle frame in 1982. For a kid's BMX frame, in a market where most production frames were straight equal-diameter cro-mo with bolt-on clamps, it was forward.

The BMX Plus! feature — January 1984

I submitted the frame to BMX Plus! Magazine in June or July of 1983. It ran as a new-products feature in the January 1984 issue, which hit newsstands in November 1983. So the math: I designed and built the frame at 13 going on 14. The page is preserved at 15.ie.

A magazine feature was the entire marketing budget. We did not run ads. We did not have a team. We had 25 frames, a bedroom on Tahiti Drive, and a half page in BMX Plus!. That was enough to sell what we had built.

The phone call — 1984, age 15

At 15 I got a phone call. I do not remember the exact day. The caller told me there was another company that held the Hi-Tech name and they would sue if we kept using it.

The other Hi-Tech had the trademark. I was 15 years old, working out of a bedroom, with 25 frames built and the decals literally hand-cut on my desk. There was no path to fight a trademark claim from a kid's bedroom in Cypress — not the time, not the money, not the legal standing. I shut the brand down. We have not been able to definitively confirm which company held the mark; the record is thin and we are not going to name a party we cannot verify.

That call ended Hi-Tech BMX in 1984. The frame design did not end — it just changed addresses.

The handoff to Pro Neck — the National Pro

Voris Dixon and Mike Scurto were friends. Mike ran Pro Neck, the stem brand that built the Pro Neck stem and a small line of frames and bars to go with it. When Hi-Tech shut down, Voris gave Mike the Hi-Tech frame design.

Mike added one gusset tube — a single brace between the top tube and down tube, behind the head tube — and the frame went to market as the Pro Neck National Pro. Everything else carried over: the pierced seat mast, the welded-on seat post clamp, the inside-and-outside dropout welds, the 1-3/8" down tube and 1-1/4" top tube combination, the geometry numbers. Look at a Pro Neck National Pro photo next to a Hi-Tech photo and the lineage is right there. The gusset is the tell.

This is on the public record at this point. Voris Dixon has confirmed it in his interview with Snakebite BMX: "The Pro Neck National Pro is my frame without the cable guides and seat post clamp and with the strange tube gusset." The interview is the cleanest public source on the lineage. Bill has separately spoken with Mike's son Will Scurto and confirmed the same story directly with the family — Will is aware and supportive of the record being set straight.

So the line is: Hi-Tech BMX (1982 to 1984, 25 frames, Cypress, California) → Pro Neck National Pro (production frame, Mike Scurto, with a single added gusset tube). The Hi-Tech is the parent design.

What Hi-Tech was, and what it was not

Hi-Tech was not a real company in any conventional sense. We had no factory of our own — VDC built the frames. We had no team. We had no distribution beyond what I could sell out of my bedroom and Larry Elliott's network and the BMX Plus! readership. We had 25 frames, a name, and a magazine feature. The bigger frame programs of the era — SE, JMC, Mongoose, GT, Redline — were running production volumes that dwarfed what I was doing by 100 to 1.

What Hi-Tech was, is the bridge between learning to weld in Ry Elliott's van at 13 and starting Supercross BMX at 20. Every decision on the Hi-Tech frame — the tube pairing, the welded-on clamp, the doubled dropouts — carried into the first Supercross frame in 1989, and into the eight USA BMX Bike of the Year race frames Supercross has built since.

Where Hi-Tech stands today

The original 25 frames are out there somewhere. We do not have a serial-number log — we did not run one. If you have one, post it on the Hi Tech BMX Facebook Group we set up around the 40th anniversary.

On the anniversary itself: Supercross released a Hi Tech BMX 40 Year Anniversary chassis in 2022 — 40 numbered 20" Pro XXL frames and 40 numbered 26" Pro XL cruisers, built in Reynolds 753, 553, and 4130 tubing with the original pierced top tube junction, the welded-on seat post clamp, and full Hi-Tech decals (printed this time, on 3M Moto Material, the way I wish we could have done them in 1982). That run is the closest you can get to a 1982 Hi-Tech without finding one of the 25 originals.

Hi-Tech is a small footnote in the BMX record. The Pro Neck National Pro that came out of it is a bigger one. The line from one to the other is the part we wanted to get on the page properly, with the names and dates intact, while everyone involved is still alive to read it.

Sources

Primary source for this chapter: Bill Ryan's first-hand account — the 25-frame production run, the Cypress address, the BMX Plus! submission, the naming-conflict phone call, the Voris Dixon partnership, and the handoff to Mike Scurto. Magazine record: BMX Plus! Magazine, January 1984 issue (on newsstands November 1983), new-products feature on the Hi-Tech frame — scan preserved at 15.ie. For the Pro Neck / National Pro lineage: BMX Icons // Voris Dixon Interview, conducted by Jay Stark, hosted at snakebitebmx.com. Additional corroboration: the BMXmuseum.com forum thread "NATIONAL PRO ~ PRO NECK" and the BMXmuseum.com Voris Dixon reference entry. Bill has also confirmed the lineage directly with Will Scurto, Mike Scurto's son.

About this page. This is a chapter of the forthcoming BMXRacingHistory.com, hosted on Legend Bike Co as a placeholder. See also: The History of BMX, Voris Dixon Bikes (VDC), SE Racing, JMC, Torker, Redline, Mongoose, GT, Haro, Schwinn, CW Racing, Hutch, S&M Bikes, DiamondBack, Skyway, Hoffman, Webco, TW BMX, CRD, Bottema Forks, Hustler, Hyper. Sanctions: BUMS, NBA, NBL, ABA, IBMXF, USA BMX. Riders: Scot Breithaupt, Eddie Fiola, Greg Hill, Mike Miranda, Perry Kramer, Pete Loncarevich, R.L. Osborn, Stu Thomsen, Todd Anderson, Tommy Brackens, Denny Davidow, Clint Miller, Jeff Bottema, Damian Fulton.

← Related chapter: Voris Dixon Bikes (VDC) — the frame shop that built Hi-Tech