Profile Racing — The St. Petersburg Machine Shop Behind the BMX 3-Piece Crank (1968 to Today)

A BMXRacingHistory.com preview · hosted on Legend Bike Co

Most component brands in early BMX started because somebody wanted to sell more parts. Profile Racing started because a father watched his kids race BMX on the weekends and couldn't stand watching their cranks flex. Everything the company is known for today — the 3-piece crank, the 48-spline axle, the fact that it still welds its own parts in the same Florida building decades later — traces back to that one observation.

A Race Car Shop in New Jersey

Jim Alley started Profile Racing, Inc. in early 1968 in Flemington, New Jersey, as a chassis shop for full-size race cars. The company's own history describes a background in auto racing, chromoly fabrication, and lightweight aluminum components — the kind of shop that built steering gears, rail chassis, and suspension parts for Northeast Modified racers through the 1970s. It was not a karting shop; every period source we found, including Profile's own year-by-year company history and its 2016 USA BMX Hall of Fame biography, describes full-size oval-track race car fabrication as the starting point.

Profile's own materials state the operation moved to St. Petersburg, Florida in 1971. The company's own "Legacy" retrospective blog series, published year by year starting in 2018, tells a slightly different story — describing the business as "firmly established in the Northeast US auto racing scene" as late as 1977, and framing the actual relocation to Pinellas County as a decision the Alley family made around 1978, after years of vacationing there. We're presenting both accounts; see What We Don't Know below.

The Kids Discover BMX

By 1978, Jim's children Corey and Justine had their first taste of BMX racing at a small track in St. Petersburg, and the whole family got hooked. Jim started going to the track to watch his kids practice. What he saw bothered him: the one-piece forged cranks every BMX bike used at the time flexed noticeably under load, especially off the start gate. Coming from a world of race car fabrication, he figured he could build something stiffer.

The Three-Piece Crank

Profile's own history dates the breakthrough to 1979: the company's first 3-piece chromoly tubular crank set, built around a 48-spline axle. Company photos from that year show Corey's original production crank, hand-etched with an "A" prefix and paired with MKS pedals. By 1980, after going through three prototypes, Profile had the box crank in full production — the same 48-spline architecture the company describes as becoming "the standard" for BMX cranksets, a standard it says held for a quarter-century afterward.

That timeline isn't the only one on record. BMX collectors researching original crank stampings, spider casting variations, and period magazine ads and tests have documented something different: they find no BMX-branded Profile product before 1981, and identify the earliest confirmed production cranks as ones Profile built under contract for Richard Hutchins, who was launching his own Hutch BMX brand and needed a machine shop capable of building a 3-piece design similar to Redline's. Under that account, Profile's own crank line, marketed under the Profile name, came slightly after the Hutch contract work, with some early runs also rebranded for Odyssey. Both the company's account and the collector research place the axle's distinctive full-length splining — a detail some point to as a giveaway of Alley's race car background — as original to the design from the start. We're not picking a winner between these two versions; both are documented, and we've boxed the discrepancy below.

The Champ Pro Frame

While the crank was going into full production, Jim Alley was already prototyping something else: the frame that became the Profile Champ Pro. It broke from typical BMX frame construction of the era in three specific ways — a down tube widened from 1 inch to 1-3/8 inches where it met the bottom bracket, a bottom bracket shell narrowed from the standard 2-5/8 inches to 2-1/2 inches, and a tail section shortened by three-quarters of an inch for a quicker gate start. All three changes were built around making the frame work better with Profile's own crank, rather than treating the crank and frame as separate products.

American Made Through the Import Years

Through the 1980s, Profile kept adding computer numerically controlled machining centers and lathes, building out its in-house manufacturing rather than buying stock parts from outside suppliers. That decision mattered most in the mid-1980s, when a lot of Profile's competition started having bicycles and components built overseas — Taiwan, China, Mexico — to cut costs. Profile's own materials describe holding the line on 100% American manufacturing through that period, adding a 7,000-square-foot expansion to its existing 14,000-square-foot St. Petersburg facility rather than moving production elsewhere. In the early 1990s, the company says it was responsible for bringing cassette hubs to the front of the BMX market, another example of the in-house engineering approach it had built its name on with the crank a decade earlier.

The Team and the Hall of Fame

Coming out of the race-car world, Alley understood that a component brand needed nationally ranked riders racing, testing, and representing its products. Profile's factory-sponsored roster over the years included Eric Rupe, Shelby James, and Jud Ciancio, among others. In 2016, USA BMX inducted Jim Alley into the National BMX Hall of Fame as that year's Industry inductee, alongside racers Lee Medlin and Terry Tenette, freestylers Dennis McCoy and Dave Mirra, and racer Michelle Cairns. His Hall of Fame bio credits him with designing the first 3-piece chromoly crank with the 48-spline spindle in 1980, and notes that decades later he was still involved in R&D on Profile's Elite line and still welding every pair of Elite cranks himself.

Still in St. Petersburg

Profile Racing operates today out of the same city where Jim Alley re-established his machine shop roughly fifty years ago. The company's own materials describe more than 20,000 additional square feet of manufacturing and warehouse space added in 2001-2002, on top of everything built out through the 1980s and 1990s. Profile still describes its full product line as 100% made in the United States of America — the same claim the company was making when the rest of the BMX industry was moving production overseas in the 1980s.

What we don't know

• The exact year Profile relocated from New Jersey to St. Petersburg, Florida. Profile's official "History" page states 1971. The company's own "Legacy" blog series, published year-by-year, describes the business as still firmly rooted in Northeast auto racing as late as 1977 and frames the actual move to Florida as a decision made around 1978. We have not found a source that reconciles the two accounts, so we're presenting both.
• The exact year of Profile's first BMX crank production. Profile's own materials say 1979 for the first prototype and 1980 for full production. The 2016 USA BMX Hall of Fame bio credits the design to 1980. BMX collector research (bmxmuseum.com) states no evidence has surfaced of Profile producing BMX products before 1981, and identifies the earliest confirmed production run as cranks built under contract for Richard Hutchins' Hutch brand, later also rebranded for Odyssey, before Profile marketed the design under its own name. This is a genuine, documented disagreement between the company's own account and independent collector research, and we have not resolved it in either direction.
• A karting connection. Some general BMX brand summaries describe Profile's origin as rooted in karting. Every primary source we found — Profile's own company history and the USA BMX Hall of Fame biography — describes the founding business as a full-size race car chassis shop, not a karting operation. We did not find a documented karting connection and have not included one.
• Precise production or sales figures for any era of Profile's crank or frame business. We found none published by the company or by independent researchers.

Related Legend Bike Co. chapters

• The History of BMX (1970-1995)
• Eric Rupe

Sources

usabmx.com — "2016 BMX Hall of Fame Inductees announced" (April 16, 2016), the sanctioning body's own Industry inductee biography for Jim Alley, including the 1968 founding date, the 1978 BMX entry, and the 1980 crank design credit. profileracing.com/about-profile/history — the company's own official history page. profileracing.com "Profile Racing's Legacy" blog series (2018), a year-by-year company retrospective including entries for 1971 through 1980, covering the New Jersey years, the move to Florida, the first production crank photos, and the Champ Pro frame's design details. oldschoolmags.com — period BMX Action and Super BMX magazine archive, including 1983 issues carrying Profile Racing's St. Petersburg, Florida address in period advertising, and the Profile Champ Pro bike test. bmxmuseum.com Reference — "1980/1981 Profile Racing Box Cranks 1st Gen" and "Profile Racing Cranks 3rd/4th/5th Gen," collector-researched crank generation guides built from period ads, magazine tests, and forum discussion; disclosed here as community record-keeping rather than a company record, and presented alongside the company's own account rather than in place of it.