Revcore — The Brand CW Racing Named After Its Own Hub (1988–1995)

Legend Bike Co · BMX heritage series

Most BMX brands are named after a person, a place, or an idea somebody had in a garage. Revcore was named after a hub. Not a metaphor about a hub — an actual part, sitting in an actual CW Racing catalog, that the company liked the sound of so much it painted the name on the side of the building.

That is the first thing to understand about Revcore, and it explains almost everything else. Revcore was not a new company. It was CW Racing, one of the recognizable Southern California race brands of the early 1980s, deciding in 1988 that it needed a fresh face and giving itself one out of its own parts bin.

Before Revcore: Coast Wheels, and what CW actually stood for

The chain starts with a bike shop. In 1979 Roger Worsham owned a shop called Coast Wheels in Yorba Linda, a small town next to Anaheim, and ran a race team out of it — Coast Wheels Racing, with Chris Blackburn, Chris Scott, Tony Swain and Henry Moreno among the original members. That shop is where CW starts.

In 1980 he started the frame brand that became CW Racing, sold the Coast Wheels shop, and put his energy into the new business. And here is where forty years of confusion begins: CW stood for Custom Works, not Coast Wheels. Because Worsham owned both, everyone assumed the letters carried over. They never did. The CW Racing chapter covers that company in full — the Phaze 1, the Z-frame, the factory team, the 1995 close and the 2010s revival.

Those two dates are settled. Bill Ryan ruled on them in 2026: CW started in 1979 as the bike shop, and the frame brand started in 1980. The CW Racing chapter carries the same pair of dates.

CW put out a run of race frames through the decade — the Z frame in 1980, the XM-Mini in 1981, the ZX-Pro in 1982, the ZXL in 1983, the CZ-Phaze 1 in 1984, a full catalog of numbered Z-series bikes by 1985, and a California Freestyle model as the sport split in two. The race team over those years ran through names including Mike Miranda in 1981 and 1982, Pete Loncarevich from late 1983 to 1986, Dizz Hicks, Gary Pollack and Ceppie Maes, with Mike Buff on the freestyle side in 1986 and Pete Augustin arriving in 1987.

1988 — the rename

By 1988 the company wanted a reset, and it took one. CW changed its name and, in the words of the CW history that documents it, pretty much just became Revcore. Same company, same owner, same building — a new name on the down tube, not a successor company and not a spin-off.

That date is settled. Bill Ryan confirmed it directly in 2026: Riteway was a 1987 purchase, the Revcore rename was 1988. The 1987 date that circulated for years — and that the CW Racing chapter carried until this correction — belongs to a different event: GT Bicycles buying Riteway Distribution, the outfit that had been getting CW's product into dealers. Losing the distributor came first, in 1987. The rename came the year after. Two things, a year apart, in that order.

Not everyone agrees. Several collector sources date the Revcore name to 1987 instead, among them a bmxmuseum.com listing for a 1987 Revcore Freestyler. This library follows Bill Ryan's dates — Riteway in 1987, the rename in 1988 — and leaves the disagreement on the record.

The choice of name is the good part. Revcore was already a CW product — the company's high-end hub. Bicross magazine, reviewing a Revcore bike in its June 1988 issue, spelled out the logic for French readers who had never heard the word: the name was not unknown to plugged-in Californians, because it was the name of a top-of-the-line CW hub. Rev for revolution, in the turning sense. Core for structure. When CW decided to put out a new brand, the staff liked how it sounded.

It is a small, practical, very BMX decision. A component name that had already earned some credibility got promoted to the front of the company, and the frames followed it.

The ownership chain

Revcore's short life is mostly a story about who held it. Roger Worsham was the sole owner of CW and Revcore. He did not share the company with a partner, and there was no second name on it until he sold.

That is settled as well. Bill Ryan ruled on it in 2026: Worsham was the sole owner of Revcore, and he sold the company to Bill Bellis. This page and the CW Racing chapter both carried a different version of the ownership until this correction. Both now say the same thing.

In 1989 Worsham decided he wanted out of the bicycle business altogether and sold CW and Revcore to Bill Bellis. Bellis held it for about two years. In February 1991, per a BMX Plus! report from May 1992, he sold the company to Mike Ferriell and Jay Becht.

Bellis also owned Hutch. He took both brands east, out of Southern California and into Louisville, Kentucky. Both were effectively finished by the move (Bill Ryan, firsthand, 2026).

The company closed in 1995. And in a detail that says something about how BMX names outlive BMX companies, Bellis was still reported to hold the CW, Revcore and Hutch names as of 2002 — seven years after the doors shut.

What Revcore actually made

This is the thinnest part of the record, and we will not pad it. Two things are solid: Revcore built complete bikes and frames — a Revcore bike test ran in Bicross magazine number 69 in June 1988 — and it built hubs, since the hub is where the name came from in the first place.

Beyond that, the best surviving evidence is indirect but useful. The reproduction decal sets that restorers buy today are cut for two visually distinct generations of Revcore frame graphics, a Gen 1 white-with-yellow-triangle set and a Gen 2 triangle set offered on chrome and clear, plus a separate Gen 2 hub decal. That is a restoration supplier's catalog, not a factory document, but it does tell you the brand lived long enough to redesign its own graphics once and that its hubs were badged as a distinct product. Collector discussion also credits Revcore with pedals, stems, bars and seat posts and with heavy knurling as a house signature — that is a reasonable-sounding claim we could not verify from a period source, so it is flagged below rather than stated here.

Who welded the frames

Nothing in the published record checked for this page says where Revcore frames were actually built. Bill Ryan supplies it firsthand, in 2026: B&E, a Southern California fabrication shop that had come up out of the Bassett Headers business.

That is new information rather than a correction. The question had simply never been put to this page before, and nothing above changes because of the answer. What it does is drop Revcore into a thread that runs through several other chapters here. B&E built frames for White Bear, and it sat in the middle of the S&M Bikes production chain, between VDC and Pro-Fab, before S&M brought manufacturing in house.

B&E worked from adjustable fixtures rather than dedicated fixed ones. That is ordinary practice for a small shop taking in a lot of customers and a lot of different geometries off a single setup — the fixture gets set for the job in hand, then reset for the next job. It is worth putting on the record because contract shops like this one welded a large share of American BMX frames in the 1980s and hardly any of them left a paper trail behind. B&E now has its own chapter in this library.

Why it is worth a chapter

Revcore is a seven-year name on a fifteen-year company, and it is easy to write it off as a marketing exercise. But it is a clean example of something the sport did constantly in the late 1980s: brands that had built their reputation in the first BMX boom hit the late-decade downturn, and rather than fold, they changed clothes. Some of those resets worked. This one bought CW roughly seven more years.

It is also a reminder of how tangled the ownership got behind brands that looked like rivals on a start gate. CW and Hutch ended up in the same hands, and went east together. A collector holding a Revcore frame and a Hutch frame is holding two bikes that finished up under the same owner.

Timeline

• 1979 CW starts as a bike shop. Roger Worsham owns Coast Wheels in Yorba Linda, California, and runs the Coast Wheels race team.
• 1980 The frame brand starts. Worsham founds CW Racing — Custom Works — and sells the Coast Wheels shop. The CW Z frame, with its oval top tube, arrives in long ZL Pro and medium ZM versions.
• 1981 The XM-Mini frame, built for small riders.
• 1982-1984 The ZX-Pro, the ZXL, then the CZ-Phaze 1.
• 1985 A full CW catalog: the Z 500, Z 1000, Z 2000 and Z 3000, plus the California Freestyle and a freestyle stem.
• 1986-1987 Mike Buff rides CW freestyle; Pete Augustin replaces Ceppie Maes on the team in 1987.
• 1987 GT Bicycles buys Riteway Distribution, the outfit getting CW's product into dealers, and CW loses its main distributor (Bill Ryan, firsthand, 2026).
• 1988 CW renames itself Revcore, after its own top-of-the-line hub. A Revcore bike test runs in Bicross magazine no. 69, June 1988.
• 1989 Worsham leaves the bicycle business and sells CW and Revcore to Bill Bellis, who also owns Hutch.
• 1991 February: Bellis sells the company to Mike Ferriell and Jay Becht.
• 1995 The company closes.
• 2002 Bellis is reported to still hold the CW, Revcore and Hutch names.
• Undated Bill Bellis takes both of his brands — CW/Revcore and Hutch — east to Louisville, Kentucky. Both are effectively finished by the move. No year is established for it, so it sits outside the dated sequence (Bill Ryan, firsthand, 2026).
• Undated Revcore frames are welded at B&E, a Southern California fabrication shop that came up out of the Bassett Headers business. No year is established for the arrangement, so it sits outside the dated sequence (Bill Ryan, firsthand, 2026).

Sources

23mag.com, "CW and Revcore BMX Company" (23mag.com/com/revcore/revcore.htm) — the spine of this page: the Coast Wheels shop and race team in Yorba Linda, the Custom Works naming correction, the CW frame model years from the 1980 Z frame through the 1985 catalog, the 1988 rename to Revcore, the 1989 sale to Bill Bellis, the February 1991 sale to Mike Ferriell and Jay Becht, the 1995 closure, and the 2002 note on who held the names. That page in turn credits homepage.ntlworld.com/cwracing (the CW history site), Bicross magazine and BMX Plus! Where 23mag's account of who held the company differs from Bill Ryan's 2026 ruling, this library follows Bill Ryan. Bicross magazine no. 69, June 1988 — the Revcore bike test, and the explanation of the name: Rev for revolution in the turning sense, Core for structure, taken from CW's top-of-the-line hub. BMX Plus!, May 1992 — the February 1991 sale to Ferriell and Becht, as cited by 23mag. Bill Ryan, founder of Supercross BMX, 2026 — firsthand, settling the two dates that had been run together: Riteway was a 1987 purchase, the Revcore rename was 1988, and GT's purchase of Riteway cost CW its main route into dealers. Bill Ryan, 2026 — firsthand, settling the founding dates and the ownership: CW started in 1979 as the bike shop and the frame brand started in 1980; Roger Worsham was the sole owner of Revcore and sold the company to Bill Bellis, who also owned Hutch and took both brands east to Louisville, Kentucky, where both were effectively finished. Bill Ryan, 2026 — firsthand, separately, on B&E as the Southern California shop that welded Revcore frames; the same shop he watched building White Bear frames and that sat in the S&M Bikes production chain. Wikipedia, "Pete Loncarevich" — independent corroboration that Roger Worsham owned CW, that CW never stood for Coast Wheels, and that Loncarevich rode for CW from December 1983 to April 1986. bmxproducts.com — current reproduction decal catalog showing two generations of Revcore frame graphics and a Revcore hub decal; a restoration supplier, cited as evidence of what existed rather than as a factory document. bmxmuseum.com holds a Revcore reference section, a catalog scan and identification threads but blocks server-side access, including the listing for a 1987 Revcore Freestyler that dates the name a year earlier than this page does; bmxsociety.com has a Revcore hubs thread and was unreachable throughout this research. Neither is cited; both are flagged as open follow-ups.

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