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

A BMXRacingHistory.com chapter · hosted on Legend Bike Co

Skyway

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

We're telling this story the same way we told the origin piece and the SE Racing chapter: neutrally. No brand gets elevated. No rider gets shorted. Where the record is contested, we say so.

Where it started

Skyway did not start as a BMX brand. It started as a Northern California manufacturing shop with a steady hand for composite plastics and a willingness to try something nobody else was making.

The company was founded in 1963 in Redding, California, sixty miles south of the Oregon line. The earliest Skyway product line was not bicycles. It was recreational and aerosports gear — kites and other small consumer goods built around the same kind of glass-reinforced plastic the shop would later make famous on a BMX bike.

The Redding factory has stayed at the same location ever since.

The wheel that wouldn't break

The problem Skyway solved was simple and physical. BMX in the mid-1970s was a brand-new sport built on bicycles that were not designed for what kids were doing to them. The wheels were the weakest link. Spoked wheels with steel rims, originally meant for paperboy bikes and Schwinn Sting-Rays, were getting hammered by jumps, berm hits, and gate drops.

Skyway's answer was the Tuff Wheel — a one-piece composite wheel with five wide spokes, molded as a single part out of glass-reinforced nylon. No individual spokes to break. No rim to true. The first generation, the Tuff Wheel I, came together in the mid-1970s and was on the market by 1977. It was the first injection-molded composite bicycle wheel in mass production.

Schwinn and the yellow Tuff Wheel

In 1977 Schwinn contracted Skyway to supply yellow Tuff Wheel I's as the original-equipment wheelset on the Schwinn Scrambler, Schwinn's entry into the BMX market. A small composite-plastics shop in Redding was now the wheel supplier for the largest American bicycle brand.

The Tuff Wheel II — 1979

The follow-up arrived in 1979. The Tuff Wheel II kept the five-spoke shape and the molded-nylon construction but reworked the hub flange, the bearing spec, and the overall geometry. It was lighter, stiffer where it needed to be, and stronger at the failure points the first generation had shown. Open any race-day photograph from 1981 through 1986 and the Tuff II is on roughly every other bike on the gate.

The Tuff Wheel II has been in continuous production from 1979 to the present day. It is one of the longest continuously produced parts in BMX, alongside the SE PK Ripper frame.

The T/A frame — 1983

By the early 1980s Skyway had the cash flow and the brand recognition to do what most parts companies eventually try to do: build a complete bike. The vehicle for that move was an aluminum race frame released in late 1983 called the Skyway T/A.

"T/A" stood for "Totally Aerodynamic." The frame used a tear-drop shaped 4130 chromoly tubeset — flat on the sides, rounded front-to-back — that nobody else in BMX was running at the time. The T/A frame weighed roughly 4 pounds 2 ounces. The matching fork weighed about 1 pound 8 ounces. That put a complete T/A in the same weight conversation as the aluminum PK Ripper and the early GT Pro Series frames.

The T/A was offered in chrome and in white. An XL version with a 19-1/2" top tube came out in late 1984. Reissue T/A framesets are still being produced today.

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

Racing was only half the story by the mid-1980s. The other half was freestyle — the trick-riding side of BMX that had been growing since Eddie Fiola, R.L. Osborn, and the rest of the early skatepark generation made it a sport of its own.

Skyway's first complete freestyle bike was the Street Beat, released in 1985. The Street Beat used a T/A-style front end mated to a wider rear end built to take a peg. The Street Styler was a flatland-positioned bike. The Street Scene filled the third slot. Skyway released a modern Street Beat frame kit in 2024.

The freestyle team

The Skyway freestyle program from 1986 to 1988 is one of the most-cited team rosters in BMX history:

  • 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.

The crash — 1988

The BMX boom of the early-to-mid 1980s ended fast. Every brand that had scaled up during the boom got hit. SE Racing went under. CW changed hands. Torker closed its first run. At the end of 1988, Skyway pulled the plug on its freestyle program.

The Tuff Wheel kept selling.

The pivot — wheelchair wheels

Skyway did not fold. The company looked at what it actually was — a composite-plastics shop that could mold a strong, light, one-piece wheel — and at what other markets needed that product.

The answer was mobility. Skyway moved hard into wheelchair wheels in the late 1980s and through the 1990s, building the same kind of molded composite wheel for manual wheelchairs that it had built for BMX bikes. Skyway-branded wheelchair wheels are still in production today.

That pivot is the reason Skyway exists at all in 2026.

Ownership today — Cycle Technology Group

The Skyway brand and its manufacturing are now part of Cycle Technology Group, a division of CEW, Inc. Genuine Tuff Wheels are produced in Baldwyn, Mississippi from the same Zytel-nylon composite spec the brand has refined over six decades. The current ownership group has kept Skyway's BMX wheel line in continuous production rather than treating it as a heritage license.

Where Skyway sits in the BMX record

Skyway solved a problem that every other BMX brand was working around. Spoked wheels broke. Skyway built a wheel that didn't. That single piece of plastic is the reason the company belongs in the same conversation as the frame-builder brands — Redline, Mongoose, SE, GT, Haro, Torker, Schwinn, CW, and Webco — even though Skyway's complete-bike run was short.

The race side of Skyway competed across every sanction of the era — BUMS, NBA, NBL, ABA, and the international IBMXF events — and the freestyle program ran under the AFA and 2-Hip series. Today's USA BMX tracks still see Tuff Wheels on the gate.

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

Sources

Wikipedia — Mat Hoffman; Freestyle BMX. 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).

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