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 one is different from every other chapter on this site. Hi-Tech BMX is mine. I was 13 when we started it, 15 when I shut it down. 25 frames, a magazine feature, a phone call about the name, and a design that walked over to another brand and kept living. The facts here come from me, first-hand — with the magazine scan and the Voris Dixon interview to back them up.

How it started — 1982, age 13

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

The second frame — the second run of frames, really — is the one that became Hi-Tech.

Randy Rizzo introduced me to Voris Dixon somewhere in there. 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, the whole setup. I had a frame design and a name I was proud of. We shook on a run of 25.

Something else was happening on that same shop floor at the same time, and I didn't find out until decades later. While I was building the Hi-Tech at Voris's shop in 1982/83, another teenager — Billy Farrell — was building the first HYPER frame right there too. Two kids, two frames, one shop. I heard it from Billy's father, years after Billy had passed: "I must of barely missed Billy at Voris's shop" (correspondence between Bill Farrell Sr. and Bill Ryan, 2020–2021, on file with Legend Bike Co).

The brand ran out of my bedroom at 6912 Tahiti Drive, Cypress, California 90630. That was the office. The warehouse. The art department. I cut the decals by hand — single-color, one at a time. 25 frames does not pay for a printed decal run.

Why we called it Hi-Tech

The name came straight off the frame. For 1982 the design was ahead of things — advanced was the word we used back then, and Hi-Tech was the badge that fit it. Here is what earned the name:

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

None of that was exotic on a custom motorcycle frame in 1982. But on a kid's BMX frame? In a market where most production frames were straight equal-diameter cro-mo with a bolt-on clamp? It was ahead of the room.

The BMX Plus! feature — January 1984

I sent the frame in 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 back in November 1983. So do the math on that — I designed and built the thing at 13 going on 14. The page is preserved over at 15.ie.

That magazine feature was the whole marketing budget. No ads. No team. 25 frames, a bedroom on Tahiti Drive, and a half page in BMX Plus!. And it was enough to move what we had built.

A note on the issue date. The January 1984 cover date is the one I remember and the one preserved in the 15.ie archive. If you find a copy of BMX Plus! from December 1983 or December 1984 with the same feature, send it — the archives are not 100% complete and we want the citation right.

The phone call — 1984, age 15

At 15 I got a phone call. I could not tell you the exact day. The guy on the line said another company held the Hi-Tech name and they would sue if we kept using it.

They had the trademark. I was 15, working out of a bedroom, 25 frames built and the decals literally hand-cut on the desk in front of me. There was no path to fight a trademark claim from a kid's bedroom in Cypress. Not the time, not the money, not the standing. So I shut it down. We still have not been able to nail down which company actually held that mark — the record is thin, and I am not going to name a party I cannot verify.

That call ended Hi-Tech BMX in 1984. The frame design did not end, though. 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 behind the Pro Neck stem, with a small line of frames and bars to go with it. When Hi-Tech folded, Voris handed Mike the Hi-Tech frame design.

Mike added one gusset tube — a single brace running 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 straight 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, all of it. Put a Pro Neck National Pro photo next to a Hi-Tech photo and the lineage is sitting right there. The gusset is the tell.

This is on the public record now. Voris 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." That interview is the cleanest public source on the lineage there is. I have also spoken with Mike's son Will Scurto and confirmed the same story straight with the family — Will knows, and he is glad to see the record set straight.

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

What Hi-Tech was, and what it wasn't

Hi-Tech was not a real company in any normal sense of the word. No factory of our own — VDC built the frames. No team. No distribution past what I could sell out of my bedroom, plus Larry Elliott's network and the BMX Plus! readership. 25 frames, a name, and a magazine feature. The big frame programs of the day — SE, JMC, Mongoose, GT, Redline — were running production numbers that beat mine 100 to 1.

What Hi-Tech was, is the bridge. From learning to weld in Ry Elliott's van at 13 to starting Supercross BMX at 20. Every call I made on that 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 we have built since.

Where Hi-Tech stands today

Those original 25 frames are out there somewhere. We never kept a serial-number log — did not think to. If you have one, post it in the Hi Tech BMX Facebook Group we set up around the 40th anniversary.

And on that anniversary, 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 back in 1982. That run is about as close as you can get to a 1982 Hi-Tech without tracking down 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 down on the page properly — names and dates intact, while everyone who was there 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. For the detail that Billy Farrell was building the first HYPER frame at Voris Dixon's shop in the same 1982/83 window: correspondence between Bill Farrell Sr. and Bill Ryan, 2020–2021, on file with Legend Bike Co.

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, California Racing Designs, 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