Steve Potts

Owner of the Original Bicycle Source, Creator of the ACS Rotor

A Legend Bike Co. rider and industry page · sources: Bill Ryan, firsthand, 2026, and Legend Bike Co.'s own Mike Buff, The Bike Shops That Made BMX, and Brian Scura pages, checked for cross-consistency

At a glance

Shop The Bicycle Source, Lomita, California — opened in the early 1980s
Known for Owning BMX's original Bicycle Source, creating the ACS Rotor and licensing it to ACS
Family Older half-brother of Mike Buff, BMX Action Trick Team rider — as Bill Ryan recalls it
Not to be confused with Steve Potts of Marin County, California, the mountain bike framebuilder and Wilderness Trail Bikes co-founder inducted into the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame in 1989. Different person, different sport.

Two things put Steve Potts' name into BMX history, and neither of them happened on a bike. He ran the shop. And he built the part.

The Bicycle Source — Lomita's Mecca of Freestyle

Potts opened the Bicycle Source in Lomita, California, in the early 1980s, not far from the stretch of the South Bay where Wizard Publications ran BMX Action out of nearby Torrance. The shop became one of the sport's most storied storefronts — riders who passed through it remember it as freestyle's unofficial Mecca, with iconic bikes hung on the walls, vintage BMX footage projected for customers, and a running conversation about old times with anyone who walked in. Legend Bike Co.'s own Bike Shops That Made BMX page counts it among the handful of neighborhood shops whose stickers ended up on half the bikes in Orange County.

The shop's regulars read like a cross-section of the era. R.L. Osborn and Mike Buff both hung around the Bicycle Source counter. The shop was also a listed sponsor of the 1981 Oakley/BMX Action Trick Team Summer Tour, alongside Oakley, Premier, Kuwahara, SE Racing and Skyway, and the Trick Team's home-video short, Trick Flick, was shot around May 1981 at a Bicycle Source open house.

Family — Mike Buff's Older Half-Brother

As Bill Ryan recalls it, if memory serves, Steve Potts was Mike Buff's older half-brother. BMX Freestylin' — Featuring the BMX Action Trick Team, the 1982 book Buff himself co-wrote, describes Potts as a formerly professional motocross racer in Southern California who by 1982 had moved into racing BMX cruisers himself, on top of running the Bicycle Source shop where Mike worked. That's the same account carried on Legend Bike Co.'s Mike Buff page, cross-checked here for consistency.

The ACS Rotor — Built for His Brother's Bar Spins

Freestyle's biggest cable problem in the early 1980s was simple: spin the handlebars all the way around, and the rear brake cable knotted itself up. Potts solved it at his own shop counter. He created what became the ACS Rotor for Mike's own bar-spinning riding, then licensed the design to ACS (Bill Ryan, firsthand, 2026). The Rotor hit the market in 1985, a year ahead of Brian Scura's rival Gyro design, and by most tellings among collectors and historians it's the invention that opened the cable-detangler category outright. Every detangler built after it, the Gyro included, traces its layout back to what Potts built to fix his own brother's problem.

The Bicycle Source Name, After Potts

Potts' original shop closed at some point after its early-1980s run — the exact year isn't documented in the sources checked for this page. Steve Blackey, who had worked for Potts at the original Lomita location, revived the Bicycle Source name in Anaheim in the early 2010s, running it with partner Danny Hubbard for about two years before it closed again (Bill Ryan, firsthand, 2026). In a FATBMX "Preserving BMX History" interview, Blackey named Potts first on his own list of people to thank for his life in BMX, ahead of Mike Buff, R.L. Osborn, Bob Haro and others — a plain marker of how much the Lomita shop meant to the people who came up through it.

Not the Marin County Steve Potts

BMX history has exactly one Steve Potts who owned a bike shop in Lomita and built the ACS Rotor. Mountain bike history has a completely different Steve Potts: a member of the original Marin County trail-riding crowd, inducted into the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame in 1989 for co-founding Wilderness Trail Bikes (WTB). That Potts built his first mountain bike in a high school metal shop class so he could go fishing in the Marin hills, and still runs Steve Potts Bicycles today. The two men share a name and a home state and nothing else the record supports. This page is about the BMX Steve Potts only.

Where the public record runs thin

Steve Potts' birth details, full name, and life beyond the Bicycle Source's early-1980s run aren't documented in the period BMX press or the archives checked for this page. The exact year the original Lomita shop closed isn't pinned down either. Most of what's known about him here — the family tie to Mike Buff, the Rotor's origin story — comes from Bill Ryan's own firsthand account, corroborated where possible against BMX Freestylin' (1982). oldschoolmags.com and bmxsociety.com were checked directly for this page and returned general period detail on the shop and the Rotor but no additional biographical fact on Potts himself.

Where Steve Potts fits in the bigger story

People: Mike Buff, R.L. Osborn, Brian Scura. Places: The Bike Shops That Made BMX. Teams: BMX Action Trick Team. The bigger arc is in our History of BMX series.

Sources

Bill Ryan, firsthand, 2026 — the ACS Rotor's origin as a shop-counter invention for Mike Buff, the Potts–Buff family tie, and the Bicycle Source's Anaheim revival and second closing. BMX Freestylin' — Featuring the BMX Action Trick Team (Mike Buff, Bob Osborn, R.L. Osborn, and Len Weed, Wizard Publications, 1982) — description of Potts as a formerly professional motocross racer turned BMX cruiser racer and Bicycle Source owner. Legend Bike Co.'s own Mike Buff, The Bike Shops That Made BMX, and Brian Scura & BS Bikeworks pages, checked for cross-consistency. FATBMX, "Re-Up: Preserving BMX History #11: Steve Blackey (USA)," fatbmx.com — Blackey's account of the Bicycle Source as freestyle's Mecca and his thank-you list naming Potts. Marin Museum of Bicycling and Mountain Bike Hall of Fame, "Steve Potts," mmbhof.org, and stevepottsbicycles.com — used only to confirm the Marin County Steve Potts is a separate person, not as a source on the BMX Steve Potts. oldschoolmags.com and bmxsociety.com were checked directly and returned general period BMX archive material rather than additional biographical detail on Potts.