MXR Hubs — The Orange, California Father-and-Son Shop That Machined BMX's Most Expensive Hubs (1986 to circa 1989)

A BMXRacingHistory.com preview · hosted on Legend Bike Co

Most BMX component brands start with a business plan. MXR started with a sixteen-year-old who wanted a better hub than he could buy, and a father with a machine shop and the patience to help him make one. They cut two pairs. One went on the kid's own bike. The other went to a friend. Inside a year the magazines had noticed, and MXR hubs were the most expensive thing hanging on a BMX shop wall.

Here is what the record actually supports, and where it stops.

A kid at the Orange Y

The earliest hard-dated appearance of the company is a short product notice in BMX Action, June 1987. It names Moses, identifies him as a local at the Orange YMCA BMX track, and prints a contact line: MXR Products, (714) 892-4890. That single line settles three things at once — the company name, the founder's surname, and the fact that this was an Orange County, California operation.

The fuller story ran in BMX Action in May 1988. The magazine gave Brian Moses's age as sixteen, described him as not the fastest racer around but thoroughly hooked on the sport and full of ideas, and laid out the origin plainly: he used the sources he had to make himself a precision hub, built two pairs — one for himself and one for his friend Danny Millwee — got noticed in print, and a year on had sold a lot of them.

The father. Neither magazine piece mentions him. The father-and-son detail comes from two people who bought hubs and wrote about it years later, independently of each other. A 2012 seller described the low-flange hubs as hand-machined in Southern California by an Orange Y local and his dad. A racer who appeared in a BMX Action photo on a Brackens frame emailed a fuller version in 2015: the hubs on his bike were MXR, hand-machined by the father of an Orange local racer, a machinist by trade, and there were not many sets made. He said his were among the first ones built.

Bill Ryan, who has known the Orange Y scene since he was a teenager himself, gives the same account and adds a detail of his own — he handed Brian Moses one of the last short High Tech frames, with another going to Bogi Givens (Bill Ryan, 2026). A separate collector recalls buying his MXR set over the counter from Bill at PowerPlus Cycles, the shop that later became Supercross BMX.

What none of it gives us is the father's first name. One 2017 listing mentions a Bob still working on a variant, but the same listing is ambiguous about whether Bob is the father or a family friend. We are not printing a name we cannot stand behind.

The hubs

MXR made hubs and nothing else. Two models: the Pro and the slightly slimmer Mini. High-flange sets came first; low-flange sets followed, and the rider quoted above owned both generations. A supposed mid-flange MXR that circulated in 2019 was called out by collectors as not genuine.

  • Construction — machined from a single block of aluminum rather than flanges pressed onto a tube. This is the detail collectors repeat most often; we have not seen it stated in a period advertisement.
  • Bearings — sealed cartridge. Period write-ups ran under the heading of sealed hubs.
  • Drilling and axles — 36 hole, 3/8 inch axles, with a flip-flop rear offered. A late variant was built around a 15-tooth freewheel for heavier riders.
  • Finish — polished bare alloy only. No collector has produced an anodized set, and the shells were stamped MXR.

Compared against the Son-Lite Turbo, which had come and gone a few years earlier, riders described the MXR look as similar but less aggressively drilled. That comparison comes up constantly in collector discussion, and the two brands sat at opposite ends of the same decade: Son-Lite in Huntington Beach in 1982 to 1984, MXR in Orange from 1986. Both were small American shops making a hub for people who wanted the best one available and did not care what it cost.

What they cost

Period figures put an MXR set at roughly $375 to $450 between late 1986 and 1988. To put that in the context of the shop wall it hung on, Hutch magnesium hubs were selling for about $110 a set at the same moment. MXR was three to four times the price of an already-premium part.

That price is the whole story of the brand. It was not a factory line. It was a father and a son cutting hubs one at a time, and the number reflects it. The counts collectors circulate — somewhere around a hundred Pro sets and a couple dozen Mini sets — are unsourced estimates rather than production records, and we are presenting them as such. What everyone agrees on is that there were not many.

Where they showed up

MXR never appears in a manufacturer's complete-bike specification that we could find. It was an aftermarket part, bought by riders and shop owners who wanted it. Where it turns up is on individual builds.

The best-documented period example is the Brackens frame photographed in BMX Action — transparent blue over chrome, running some of the first MXR hubs ever made, laced to Araya 7X rims. Beyond that, MXR sets have surfaced on builds carrying Free Agent, JMC, Boss, GJS, Redline, Schwinn, and S&M badges — though many of those are modern restorations rather than period builds, and should be read that way.

Rims. Overwhelmingly Araya, and the 7X in particular, by a wide margin over everything else. A handful of builds pair MXR with Ukai Speedline hoops. We found no documented Sun Metal pairing. Spokes ran the range from period Asahi to stainless, and one owner reports that the only wheelset he has ever bothered to build with titanium spokes is the one with MXR hubs in the middle of it.

No corporate ties. We looked for a supply, licensing, or ownership link between MXR and the established component houses — ACS, Bullseye, Phil Wood, SunTour, Sugino — and found none. Those names come up only as the benchmarks people measured MXR against. As far as the record shows, this was one family and one machine shop, start to finish.

Where the record runs thin

  • The father's first name. Confirmed to exist as a machinist and as the second half of the operation, by two independent buyers. Never named in any source we can trust.
  • When it ended. Genuinely undocumented. There is no closing notice, no final advertisement, no account of a wind-down. Collector guesses run from 1989 to the early 1990s and none of them cite anything.
  • Production numbers. Every figure in circulation traces back to a single unsourced estimate. There is no factory record.
  • What Brian Moses did next. Unknown. A collector who attempted to contact the family in 2019 reported no response.
  • Counterfeits. Fake MXR hubs exist and are actively discussed by collectors, who point to coarse flange drilling and incorrect axle and bearing fitment as the tells. Anyone buying a set today should treat provenance as part of the purchase.
  • bmxsociety.com was unreachable throughout the research for this chapter. It is named here as a source we attempted and could not use.

Related Legend Bike Co. chapters

Sources

BMX Action, June 1987 — product notice naming Moses, the Orange YMCA, and MXR Products with a (714) contact number; scanned issue archived at oldschoolmags.com. BMX Action, May 1988 — the origin feature giving Moses's age, the two-pair beginning, and the Danny Millwee detail; transcribed on the Old School BMX Parts archive blog and separately cited by a collector who posted the original page scan in 2010. bmxmuseum.com — reference entries, for-sale listings, and forum threads dated 2010 through 2021, including the 2015 first-hand account from the rider photographed on the Brackens frame, the 2012 seller description of the father-and-son shop, and the 2019 counterfeit discussion. oldschoolmags.com — scanned BMX Action and BMX Plus! archive; a late-1980s mail-order price list carrying an MXR entry was located but the specific issue could not be pinned down. 23mag.com — searched; no MXR coverage exists there. bmxsociety.com — unreachable for the duration of this research; disclosed rather than skipped. Bill Ryan, 2026 — the father-and-son account and the High Tech frame detail. Legend Bike Co. — Orange Y BMX, Danny Millwee, Tommy Brackens, High Tech BMX, and Son-Lite Hubs chapters, cross-referenced for consistency.