Son-Lite Hubs — The Huntington Beach Turbo, and What the LRP Connection Actually Was (circa 1982 to 1984)

A BMXRacingHistory.com preview · hosted on Legend Bike Co

Son-Lite lasted about two years in print and then vanished so completely that collectors have spent longer trying to find out who owned it than the company spent advertising. What it left behind is a hub that people still argue about, a design that a bigger brand followed a year later, and a counterfeit problem serious enough to have its own permanent thread on the biggest BMX collector site in the world.

It also left behind a question we were asked to settle: what exactly was the tie between Son-Lite and LRP? The answer turns out to be narrower and more interesting than the rumor.

The company

Son-Lite Racing Products operated out of 15561 Computer Lane, Suite E, Huntington Beach, California 92649, phone (714) 897-3298. That address and number are printed on every Son-Lite advertisement we examined, alongside an invitation for dealer inquiries — meaning Son-Lite ran its own dealer channel and sold through bike shops under its own name.

Beyond the address, the ownership is a wall. The advertising never names a proprietor. Collectors have chased it for well over a decade and come up with nothing; one thread on the subject has people openly saying they have wondered for years and gotten nowhere. We are not going to invent an answer where the people closest to the material have failed to find one.

The advertising window. The earliest Son-Lite advertisement anyone has located ran in BMX Plus! in April 1983. The first BMX Action appearance came the following month, May 1983 — established by a collector who walked BMX Action's advertiser index backward as far as January 1980 without finding an earlier one. Ads then run through September 1983, December 1983, February 1984, and finally November 1984. Nothing after that.

Several owners independently report buying Son-Lite sets in 1982, before any known advertisement, which suggests the hubs were being made and sold locally before the company started buying magazine space. That is a consistent pattern of first-hand recollection rather than a documented date, and we are flagging it as such.

The Turbo

Son-Lite made one thing. The advertising claim it led with was structural: the only hub manufactured from one piece of aluminum alloy barstock, rather than two flanges pressed onto a tube. Everything else followed from that.

  • Body — one-piece machined 6061-T6 aluminum, with the flanges angled for spoke alignment and an hourglass barrel profile.
  • Axles — 6AL-4V titanium, 49 grams, on the original Turbo.
  • Bearings — sealed cartridge, sourced from IKS in Japan. An owner who needed replacements traced them back to the same supplier decades later.
  • Adjustment — threaded alloy collars set the bearing preload, thread-locked rather than pinched with grub screws.
  • Finish — raw machined and polished aluminum. Not plated, not chromed. Collectors are firm that polishing a surviving set destroys its value.
  • Marking — a very faint laser etch on the flange face. Some genuine sets left the shop with an oval Son-Lite decal instead.
  • Drilling — 36 hole as standard. The advertising carried a lifetime guarantee against defects and the line The Shape of Things to Come.

The Turbo II arrived in the December 1983 advertising. It traded the titanium axle for 4130 chromoly, ran a smaller flange, came in black anodizing, and made the rear flip-flop so a racer could swap gearing quickly. It reads like a cost-reduced, more practical version of the same idea.

A set ran about $200 through bike shops in 1982 and 1983, according to owners who bought them new.

The LRP question

Here is what we can and cannot say.

What Legend Bike Co.'s own LRP chapter establishes. Pete Loncarevich and his father built Loncarevich Racing Products as a parts company while Pete was still riding for Diamond Back — seatposts, pedal cages, and hubs, made and sold under the LRP name, before the LRP race frame ever existed. Hubs were part of that business from the beginning. See LRP and Pete Loncarevich.

What the outside record says. One account, posted to a BMXmuseum thread about LRP in November 2013, states that Pete was riding for Diamond Back when the LRP distribution side got going, that Son-Lite hubs were a product LRP sold, and that this is how a Diamond Back factory teammate of Pete's — Harry Leary — came to be photographed on Son-Lite hubs. That is the entire documentary basis for the connection: a single forum post, written roughly thirty years after the fact, uncorroborated by any period source.

What the period documents show. Two separate companies. Son-Lite advertised from Huntington Beach with its own dealer program. LRP advertised from a PO box in Irvine, and the LRP advertisement we examined lists pedal cages, seatposts, a titanium seatpost, apparel, cleaner, lube, stickers, and a poster — and no hubs at all. Different cities, different channels, separate advertiser listings.

Our reading. If there was a tie, it was commercial rather than corporate. Son-Lite was not LRP's brand, LRP did not manufacture Son-Lite hubs, and no shared ownership or family is evidenced anywhere. The most the record supports is that LRP's parts business carried Son-Lite hubs among the things it sold — which is consistent with LRP's own hub line and with how small Southern California parts operations worked in that era. We are presenting that as a plausible single-source claim, not as a fact.

One loose end we are not going to pretend to resolve. Son-Lite's hub was called the Turbo. Diamond Back's Harry Leary signature frame of the same period was also called the Turbo. Whether that is coincidence or connection, no source we found addresses. We are noting it because a reader will notice it, not because we can explain it.

A dating conflict. Collector accounts put LRP's founding in early 1983 and its shutdown in November 1983 as a condition of the CW deal — yet an LRP advertisement exists dated November 1981. The likeliest reconciliation is that LRP ran as a mail-order parts business from around 1981 and that the LRP frame is what belongs to 1983. We are flagging the conflict rather than smoothing it over.

Where the hubs turned up

Son-Lite was an aftermarket upgrade, not a factory specification. We found no complete bike that shipped with Son-Lite hubs and no magazine bike test that lists them. What survives is builds: a 1982 Torker 280X, an SE Racing PK Ripper, a 1981 Hutch, and a Profile cruiser among them.

Rims. Araya 7X in chrome and alloy dominates, with Ukai Speedline and Mongoose Pro Class hoops also documented. No Sun Metal, Ambrosio, or Ultramax pairing surfaced in any source.

The design that followed. The first-generation TNT Revolver, which arrived in 1984, carried the same signature — a ring of round drill-outs punched clean through each flange. Son-Lite got there first by a year or more. The collector consensus is that TNT followed Son-Lite's look; no manufacturer statement exists either way, so consensus is what it is.

Cheap look-alikes from ACS circulated at a fraction of the price and are still mistaken for the real thing. Beyond that, we found no supply, licensing, or ownership relationship between Son-Lite and any other component house — Bullseye, Phil Wood, SunTour and the rest come up only as comparisons. The nearest thing to a successor in spirit is MXR, the Orange family shop that started making its own billet sealed hubs a couple of years after Son-Lite's last advertisement ran.

Where the record runs thin

  • Who owned and ran Son-Lite. Genuinely unknown, and not for lack of people trying. A decal image bearing the words Casal & Sons has been posted alongside Son-Lite discussion, but nothing ties it to the company beyond that one image, so we are not treating it as a lead.
  • The nature of the LRP tie. One forum post, thirty years after the fact. Treat as unconfirmed.
  • Whether the Son-Lite Turbo name and the Diamond Back Turbo name are related. Unaddressed by every source we found.
  • How it ended. The advertising stops after November 1984 and there is no closure notice, no sale, no bankruptcy record. It simply stops.
  • Hub weights and exact axle spacing. Never published. Only the 49-gram titanium axle figure is documented.
  • The 2011 trademark filing for the Son-Lite Racing Products name, made by an unrelated party in Los Alamitos, covered frames and grips rather than hubs, was filed on an intent-to-use basis, and was abandoned in November 2011. It is not a continuation of the original company.
  • bmxsociety.com was unreachable during this research. Threads on Son-Lite are known to exist there, including one on the LRP question, and they are the most likely place a second independent account of the tie would be found. Disclosed rather than skipped.

Related Legend Bike Co. chapters

Sources

Period Son-Lite advertisements dated September 1983, February 1984, and November 1984, examined directly via the Vintage BMX Ads archive; the November 1984 advertisement carries the one-piece barstock claim, the address, and the dealer inquiry line. Ad dates for April 1983 (BMX Plus!, p.51) and May 1983 (BMX Action, p.25) established by a collector working through the scanned magazine archive at oldschoolmags.com. Period LRP advertisement dated November 1981, showing the Irvine PO box and the full LRP product list. bmxmuseum.com — the LRP thread of November 2013 containing the sole account of the Son-Lite and LRP connection, the standing Son-Lite reference and counterfeits thread, owner accounts of 1982 purchases, bearing and finish discussion, and the USPTO record for serial 85249039, filed February 23, 2011 and abandoned November 29, 2011. 23mag.com — searched; no Son-Lite company coverage exists there. bmxsociety.com — unreachable for the duration of this research; relevant threads are known to exist and remain unread. Legend Bike Co. — LRP, Pete Loncarevich, Diamond Back, and MXR Hubs chapters, cross-referenced for consistency.