Skyway Recreation Products — The Company Behind the Tuff Wheel

A BMXRacingHistory.com chapter · hosted on Legend Bike Co

Most people think Skyway is a wheel. Fair enough — the Tuff Wheel earned that. But behind the wheel was a real company, with a founder, a town, a payroll, and a forty-year run that most BMX brands would trade about anything for. This is the story of that company. The wheel itself we cover in full over on our Skyway Tuff Wheel page — go read that one for the deep dive. This page is about the outfit that made it.

A plastics shop, not a bike company

Skyway didn't grow out of BMX. It grew out of a plastics shop — guys who knew how to mold composite parts and weren't scared to build something nobody else was building. The company got going in 1963. The Redding Record Searchlight, the hometown paper that covered Skyway for decades, says it was established in Van Nuys, California before it ever moved north. (You'll see a 1966 founding date floating around on collector sites too. We're going with the local paper and the company's own retelling: 1963.)

The early business was recreational gear, aerosports, motocross accessories. Kites and odds and ends, all molded out of the same glass-reinforced plastic that would one day make the name. And here's the part people forget — Skyway's first crack at a wheel wasn't a bicycle wheel at all. With the company already deep in motocross parts, they figured they'd build the industry's first composite nylon motorcycle wheel. Then they did the math on the heat a motorcycle wheel throws off and realized the plastic couldn't take it. So they went the next best direction. A composite wheel for a bicycle. For BMX.

Funny how the big idea showed up as the consolation prize.

Chuck Raudman and the move to Redding

The man who started it was Chuck Raudman. He developed the Tuff Wheel — a molded nylon bike wheel — while living in Southern California in 1974. Two years later he moved Skyway up to Redding, sixty miles south of the Oregon line, and got production rolling in 1977. Raudman ran the place for the long haul and didn't retire until 1995. That's not a flip. That's a guy building a company.

And the Redding plant — out on Caterpillar Road — became the whole identity of the thing. The Tuff Wheels were molded there on multi-ton injection presses and shipped all over the world. A lot of people in the bike trade assumed Redding was just the corporate office. It wasn't. The wheels were genuinely made there, every one of them, for forty years.

The people who ran it

What separates Skyway from most BMX brands of the era is who stayed. This wasn't a name that got flipped from one holding company to the next every few years. It was owner-operated, in the same town, by the same crew, for decades.

The names that come up over and over: Ken Coster, who came to Redding to work for Skyway in 1977 and ended up president. Rein Stolz, who started in 1980. Parrey Cremeans, who walked in as a mold operator in 1979, right out of Enterprise High School. Those three eventually owned the company together. Depending on how hard the orders were coming, the Redding operation ran anywhere from a dozen people up to around eighty. When freestyle blew up in '83 and '84, Coster has said flat out they could not produce enough wheels to keep up.

That's the company. Not a logo. A building full of people who stuck.

The product line — way more than the wheel

The Tuff Wheel paid the bills, but Skyway built a real catalog around it. Here's the spread, as the BMX record has it:

• Tuff Wheel I, then Tuff Wheel II — the heart of it. The full wheel story is on our Skyway Tuff Wheel page.
• The Tuff Fork — they tried a fork. Then decided they wanted to stay a wheel company and killed it about six months later. Short life. Collectors love it.
• The Tuff Pedal — a bearing-less, graphite-reinforced pedal. One of the lightest made in its day.
• The Spin-Master — Skyway's own version of the freestyle gyro / detangler.
• Skyway-branded gears, stems, brake pads — plus pegs, freestyle platforms, and race and freestyle bars once they went complete-bike.
• Apparel — race pants, jerseys, T-shirts, hats, helmets. The full team-support kit.

Then there's the part that gets overlooked. Skyway was a serious OEM supplier — they built wheels that went out under other companies' names. Schwinn was the first big one in 1977, putting yellow Tuff Wheels on the Scrambler. Suntour worked with Skyway around the dawn of the '80s to build the first freewheel-style Tuff hub. And the famous Graphite Tuff Wheel — the one with the gold-anodized Campagnolo hubs — came out of work with the DuPont labs. Perry Kramer was the first racer to win a national on a set of Graphites, and that win is what pushed Skyway to sell them to the public, not just the factory guys.

The T/A and the leap to complete bikes

By the early '80s Skyway had the cash and the name to do what every parts company eventually itches to do — build a whole bike. Their answer was the Skyway T/A, out in late 1983. "T/A" for Totally Aerodynamic, named for a tear-drop chromoly tubeset nobody else in BMX was running. Frame came in around 4 pounds 2 ounces, fork about 1 pound 8 ounces. Light, for the day, and a lot of people still call it one of the prettiest framesets ever made. We give the T/A its own full treatment on the Tuff Wheel page — here the point is just what it meant for the company: Skyway had stopped being only a parts brand.

From there they went all the way. By the back half of the '80s Skyway was selling complete bikes for the first time — the Street Beat, Street Styler, and Street Scene freestyle models, built around a T/A-style front end. Then in 1988 came two complete race bikes, the 280TA and 300TA. Worth noting — those two ran spoked Araya wheels, not Skyway's own mags. A little ironic for the wheel company, but that's where the race market had gone.

The teams that carried the name

You don't build a brand that lives forty years without riders. Skyway had them on both sides of BMX.

On the race side, Andy Patterson — a 2022 BMX Hall of Fame inductee — was big enough to get his own signature Tuff Wheel II around 1984–85. The Skyway jersey showed up at tracks across every sanction going, from the early West Coast days right through the boom.

On the freestyle side, the 1986-to-1988 Skyway team is one of the most loaded rosters anybody ever put together. Mat Hoffman got his first factory ride there before he went on to Haro and then built Hoffman Bikes — and notably he rode a Skyway T/A race frame for a long stretch before the Street Beat even existed. Alongside him: Kevin Jones, widely credited with inventing modern flatland; Eddie Roman, the rider-filmmaker who changed how BMX videos got made; Maurice Meyer, an early street pioneer; Hugo Gonzalez, who did some of the first wallrides; and Craig Campbell, the man credited with the first peg stalls and the first 540 wallride — done on a Street Beat with Tuff Wheels. The full freestyle roster lives on the Tuff Wheel page; the point here is the company was backing this much talent at once.

The crash, and the pivot that saved the company

The mid-'80s BMX boom didn't ease off. It fell off a cliff. End of 1988 Skyway pulled the plug on the freestyle program, same as half the industry. And the race market was sliding too — riders were moving to 36- and 48-spoke wheels that the molded mag just couldn't match for strength. There's also a quieter theory worth airing: the day Skyway started selling complete bikes, it turned its own wheel customers into competitors. Whatever the mix, the BMX side of Skyway went quiet fast.

Most companies don't survive a hit like that. Skyway did — and here's the smart part. They looked hard at what they actually were. Not a bike brand. A plastics shop that could mold a strong, light, one-piece wheel. So they asked who else needed exactly that, and the answer was mobility. Skyway went after the wheelchair-wheel market, hard, and won it. They'd already been dabbling in it by 1982. That move is the whole reason there's still a Skyway. Over the years the same molding know-how went into everything from storage bins you'd find at a big-box store to wheels for search-and-rescue vehicles and unmanned aircraft.

The Tuff Wheel, by the way, never stopped selling the entire time.

The end of the Redding era — 2017

For all of it — the boom, the crash, the wheelchair pivot, the slow vintage-BMX comeback — Skyway stayed in Redding, same address, same owners, many of the same employees who'd been there in the BMX heyday. Then in March 2017 the owners sold the company to Custom Engineered Wheels (CEW) of Warsaw, Indiana — a former customer and vendor that wanted into the bike market. CEW kept the Skyway name and the U.S. wheel production going. The Redding plant closed by that summer. Coster, Stolz, and Cremeans were straight about it: they were getting older, and selling to CEW was the way to make sure the Skyway name outlived them. "In order for legends to stay alive," as the BMX press put it at the time, "you need to keep talking about them."

Skyway's contribution sits in the Smithsonian, by the way — a Tuff Wheel on display in Washington, D.C. Not many BMX parts can say that.

Where the company stands now

The Skyway brand and its tooling live on under CEW / Cycle Technology Group, with genuine Tuff Wheels still produced in the U.S. The race team, the freestyle super-roster, the chrome T/A, the Caterpillar Road molding floor — all of that belongs to one specific window. But the company made it through, on its own terms, by knowing exactly what it was good at. A whole lot of BMX names from that era can't say the same. Skyway can.

Sources

Redding Record Searchlight — "End of an era: Skyway closing in Redding" by David Benda (June 2017): founder Chuck Raudman, 1974 Tuff Wheel development, Van Nuys 1963 / Redding 1976 / production 1977, owners Ken Coster, Rein Stolz, Parrey Cremeans, Caterpillar Road plant, employee counts, Smithsonian display, 2017 sale to Custom Engineered Wheels of Warsaw, Indiana. BMXmuseum.com — Skyway brand history and bike database (motocross-accessory origin, motorcycle-wheel attempt, Tuff Fork, Tuff Pedal, Spin-Master, Suntour and DuPont/Campagnolo Graphite work, Perry Kramer national win, T/A specs, Street Beat / Street Styler / Street Scene, 280TA and 300TA with Araya wheels, wheelchair pivot, non-BMX product range). LUXBMX.com — "Skyway: A Brief History" (founding, Schwinn deal, Andy Patterson signature Tuff Wheel II and 2022 Hall of Fame, ownership history, 2017 CEW sale). DIG BMX — "Skyway is Closing" by Brian Tunney (June 2017): 1986–88 freestyle roster, Craig Campbell on a Street Beat, Mat Hoffman on a T/A race frame, the brand's wind-down. oldschoolmags.com — archived Skyway catalog scans (1982). CEWheelsInc.com / Cycle Technology Group — current Skyway ownership.

Related Legend Bike Co. chapters

• Read next: Skyway — The Story of a Wheel That Wouldn't Break (the Tuff Wheel, the T/A, and the freestyle team in full)
• The History of BMX (1970-1995) · Hoffman Bikes · SE Racing
• Brands: Diamond Back · Redline · Mongoose · GT · Haro · Torker · Schwinn · CW Racing · Webco
• Sanctions: NBA · NBL · ABA · IBMXF · USA BMX