A BMXRacingHistory.com chapter · hosted on Legend Bike Co

Skyway

The Story of a Wheel That Wouldn't Break (1963 to Today)

Every kid who raced BMX in the early days knew the sound — that sick metallic ping of a spoke letting go mid-jump, and the wobble that meant your day was done. Then a little plastics shop in Redding molded a wheel with no spokes to snap and no rim to true, ever. They called it the Tuff Wheel, and forty-some years later it's still rolling off the line. This is how an unbreakable chunk of composite plastic earned Skyway a permanent spot in the BMX record — on the freestyle ramp and on the gate both.

Read the full Skyway Recreation company history →

Where it started

Skyway didn't come up through BMX. It came up as a Northern California plastics shop — guys who knew how to mold composite parts and weren't afraid to build something nobody else was making.

The company got going in 1963 in Redding, California, sixty miles south of the Oregon line. And the first thing out the door wasn't a bike part. It was recreational and aerosports gear — kites, odds and ends, all built out of the same glass-reinforced plastic that would one day make their name on a BMX bike. Funny how that works.

That same Redding factory has never moved.

The wheel that wouldn't break

The problem Skyway cracked was about as simple as it gets. BMX in the mid-1970s was a brand-new sport, and kids were doing it on bikes that were never built for any of it. The wheels gave out first. Steel-rim spoked wheels off paperboy bikes and Schwinn Sting-Rays, getting beat to death by jumps, berms, and gate drops. They didn't stand a chance.

Skyway's fix was the Tuff Wheel — one piece, five fat spokes, the whole thing molded as a single part out of glass-reinforced nylon. No spokes to snap. No rim to true. Ever. The first one, the Tuff Wheel I, came together in the mid-1970s and was for sale by 1977 (Skyway's own early-1980s brochure puts the design year at 1975; longtime company president Ken Coster has recalled 1974 in later interviews — the exact year isn't nailed down in a single period source, though the 1977 market date is solid). First injection-molded composite bicycle wheel ever made in real numbers.

Schwinn and the yellow Tuff Wheel

Then in 1977 Schwinn came calling. They contracted Skyway to supply yellow Tuff Wheel I's as the factory wheelset on the Schwinn Scrambler, their way into BMX. Sit with that one a second. A little plastics shop in Redding was now the wheel supplier for the biggest bike brand in America.

The Tuff Wheel II — 1979

The next one landed in 1979. The Tuff Wheel II kept the five-spoke look and the molded nylon, but they went back into the hub flange, the bearing spec, the whole geometry. Lighter. Stiffer where it counted. Stronger exactly where the first one had shown its weak spots. Pull up any race-day photo from 1981 through 1986 and the Tuff II is sitting on about every other bike on the gate.

And it never stopped. The Tuff Wheel II has been made without a break from 1979 right up to now — one of the longest continuously produced parts in all of BMX, right alongside the SE PK Ripper frame. A 24-inch cruiser-class Tuff Wheel followed in January 1984, first advertised that month in BMX Action.

On the gate — the race team

Perry Kramer was the first racer to win a national on Skyway's Graphite Tuff Wheel — the gold-anodized-hub version Skyway built out of its work with DuPont — and that win is what pushed Skyway to start selling the Graphite to the public instead of keeping it factory-only.

Skyway Recreations ran its own factory race program alongside the freestyle side. Cheri Elliott rode for Skyway from 1983 through 1985 and took the ABA National No. 1 Girl title all three years — she went into the ABA Hall of Fame in 1989 as its first woman inductee, and the U.S. Bicycling Hall of Fame in 2008. Andy Patterson raced for Skyway from December 1981 to June 1984 and got his own signature Tuff Wheel II around 1984-85 — a 2022 BMX Hall of Fame inductee, and not to be confused with the Patterson Racing Products family (Vance, Brian, and Brent Patterson), a completely different Patterson. Richie Anderson turned pro with Skyway on January 1, 1985, after four and a half months on Torker's last factory roster before that company's 1984 bankruptcy — and left Skyway in December 1985 when the team wouldn't sign his brother Ronnie alongside him. And Denny Davidow carried Skyway as a co-sponsor in the early 1980s while still racing a TW frame underneath — Skyway brought the Tuff Wheels and the money, TW kept supplying the chassis, a common arrangement for component brands in that era.

The T/A frame — 1983

By the early 1980s Skyway had the money coming in and the name to do what every parts company eventually wants to do — build a whole bike. Their shot at it was an aluminum race frame that dropped in late 1983, the Skyway T/A.

"T/A" meant "Totally Aerodynamic." The frame ran a tear-drop 4130 chromoly tubeset — flat on the sides, rounded front to back — that nobody else in BMX was messing with at the time. It came in around 4 pounds 2 ounces. The matching fork, about 1 pound 8 ounces. That put a complete T/A right in the same weight class as the aluminum PK Ripper and those early GT Pro Series frames. Good company.

You could get it in chrome or white. An XL with a 19-1/2" top tube showed up in late 1984. They're still making reissue T/A framesets today.

The freestyle line — Street Beat, Street Styler, Street Scene

By the mid-1980s racing was only half of it. The other half was freestyle — the trick side of BMX that had been building ever since Eddie Fiola, R.L. Osborn, and that first wave of skatepark kids turned it into its own thing entirely.

Skyway's first complete freestyle bike was the Street Beat, out in 1985. T/A-style front end, wider rear to take a peg. The Street Styler was set up for flatland. The Street Scene rounded it out. And get this — Skyway dropped a modern Street Beat frame kit in 2024. Forty years on, still at it.

The freestyle team

The Skyway freestyle program from 1986 to 1988 is one of the most talked-about rosters in BMX, period:

  • Mat Hoffman — signed in 1987 at age 15. Skyway was Hoffman's first factory sponsor. He toured the AFA Masters circuit and the 2-Hip "Meet the Street" series under Skyway colors before moving on to Haro and eventually founding Hoffman Bikes.
  • Eddie Roman — one of the era's most influential street and ramp riders, and a filmmaker (Aggroman, Headfirst).
  • Kevin Jones — widely cited as the rider who invented modern flatland.
  • Maurice Meyer, Hugo Gonzalez, and Craig Campbell.
  • Robert Peterson — rode for the Skyway / Curb Dogs freestyle squad, including a 1984 UK demo tour, and was interviewed in Freestylin''s winter 1984-85 issue.

The crash — 1988

The BMX boom of the early-to-mid '80s didn't taper off. It dropped. Every brand that had geared up for the good times took it on the chin. SE Racing went under. CW changed hands. Torker shut down its first run. End of 1988, Skyway killed the freestyle program.

The Tuff Wheel kept right on selling.

The pivot — wheelchair wheels

But Skyway didn't fold. They took an honest look at what they actually were — a plastics shop that could mold a strong, light, one-piece wheel — and asked who else needed exactly that.

Turned out it was mobility. Skyway went all in on wheelchair wheels through the late '80s and the '90s, building the same molded composite wheel for manual wheelchairs that they'd been building for BMX bikes all along. Those Skyway wheelchair wheels are still in production right now.

That move, plain and simple, is why there's still a Skyway in 2026 at all.

Ownership today — Cycle Technology Group

The Skyway brand and the manufacturing behind it now sit under Cycle Technology Group, a division of CEW, Inc. Genuine Tuff Wheels come out of Baldwyn, Mississippi, off the same Zytel-nylon composite spec the brand has been dialing in for six decades. And give the current owners credit — they've kept the BMX wheel line actually running instead of slapping the name on a heritage license and calling it a day.

Where Skyway sits in the BMX record

Skyway fixed the one thing every other BMX brand just learned to live with. Spoked wheels broke. Skyway built one that didn't. That single chunk of molded plastic is why the name belongs in the same breath as the frame guys — Redline, Mongoose, SE, GT, Haro, Torker, Schwinn, CW, and Webco — even though their complete-bike run barely lasted.

The race side of Skyway showed up across every sanction going — BUMS, NBA, NBL, ABA, and the international IBMXF races — and the freestyle side ran under the AFA and 2-Hip series. Walk a USA BMX track today and you'll still spot Tuff Wheels on the gate. Some things just don't quit.

Legend Bike Co. carries current-production Skyway Tuff Wheel II's in its own catalog.

What we're still verifying

  • Tuff Wheel design year. Skyway's own early-1980s brochure states 1975 ("In 1975, TUFF WHEEL I was born"); a 2002 interview with longtime company president Ken Coster recalls 1974. Both agree the wheel reached the market in 1977 — we're reporting it as mid-1970s design, 1977 market, rather than picking a side.
  • Robert Peterson's exact Skyway years. He shows up as a Skyway/Curb Dogs freestyle rider in a 1984 UK demo tour and a winter 1984-85 Freestylin' interview, but the start and end dates of his sponsorship aren't pinned down the way Mat Hoffman's are.

Sources

Wikipedia — Mat Hoffman; Freestyle BMX; Andy Patterson; Richie Anderson (BMX rider); Cheri Elliott. BMXmuseum.com — Skyway bike database (T/A, Street Beat, Street Styler, Street Scene); Skyway Tuff Wheel registry. luxbmx.com — "Skyway: A Brief History." DIG BMX — "End of an Era: Skyway." CEWheelsInc.com — Cycle Technology Group / Skyway Wheels official pages. sugarcayne.com and alansbmx.com — "2024 Skyway Street Beat" launch coverage. oldschoolmags.com — archived Skyway catalog scans (1982). Schwinn Scrambler factory specification sheets (1977-1979). restoringtuffs.com — dated Skyway ad and brochure scans, including the circa-1981 company brochure and print ads from 1976 through 1986. bmxproducts.com — 2002 interview with longtime Skyway president Ken Coster. classiccycleus.com — Skyway T/A frame specifications. planetbmx.tumblr.com, fatbmx.com, and bmxmdb.com — Robert Peterson's Skyway/Curb Dogs freestyle record. Legend Bike Co.'s own Richie Anderson and Denny Davidow chapters, cross-checked for consistency.

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