A BMXRacingHistory.com chapter · hosted on Legend Bike Co.

Tiger Teeth

A component brand that existed because one racer kept telling his mother what was breaking

By Bill Ryan · Founder of Supercross BMX · 37+ years in BMX · Started at SE Racing, 1981

The BMX aftermarket has always worked the same way. Somebody rides, somebody breaks something, and if that somebody happens to be standing next to a machine shop or a family business, a product gets born. Tiger Teeth is a clean example of that, with the added wrinkle that the person doing the complaining was a teenager and the person he complained to was his mother.

It came out of S&S Bikes, the Sheehan family operation in Central Texas. It made a small line of parts. It is remembered today almost entirely for one of them.

Where it came from

S&S — recorded in full as Sheehan & Sheehan Racing — was a small family-owned bike shop, mail-order desk and trackside vending trailer working the Round Rock, Pflugerville and Austin area from the 1980s into the early 1990s. It existed because the family's son, Ryan Sheehan, raced and constantly needed parts.

Selling parts led to making them. Supercross BMX's own account of the era puts the origin squarely on Ryan: he convinced his mom to start a little company, Tiger Teeth, to help with some of the problems that the pros and the older amateurs were having with their bikes.

That phrasing is worth sitting with, because it defines the brand's brief. Not entry-level parts. Not house-brand filler to round out a catalog. Parts aimed at the riders who were hardest on equipment — the pros and the grown-up amateurs who were strong enough to destroy things that held up fine for everybody else.

Bitchin' Bolts came first

The first product out of the door was Bitchin' Bolts, a crank bolt product. Both the Supercross account and BMXmuseum's reference on the company name it as the starting point, and BMXmuseum specifies that the bolts were for cranks.

Crank bolts are about as unglamorous as BMX hardware gets, and they are also exactly the sort of thing that ruins a race day when they let go. A company that starts with crank bolts is a company started by someone who was actually at the track.

The chainwheels

Then came the part the brand is named for.

The Tiger Teeth chainwheels were machined aluminum sprockets. BMXmuseum's reference entry on them records the details that survive:

• Sizes running between 39 and 47 teeth. A 42-tooth example also turns up in the collector market.
• Finishes in raw or chrome.
• At least two distinct designs. The record describes a three-spoke, angled or tri-blade pattern, and a separate multi-hole pattern, with the two treated as successive generations.
• Material — 6061 aluminum, confirmed later by Supercross BMX when it measured an original against the replica it produced.

The designs are the reason they get spotted at swap meets thirty years on. A tri-blade sprocket does not look like anything else on a bike, and once you have seen one you can pick it out of a parts bin across a room.

The JIVE panels — an S&S line, not a Tiger Teeth one

Alongside the parts it manufactured, the same family was importing. Supercross BMX's account says that after the bolts and the chainwheels came JIVE panels from Ireland.

Keep the attribution straight, because it is easy to get wrong. The importing was S&S's business, not Tiger Teeth's. Tiger Teeth was the manufacturing name — the bolts and the chainwheels. The JIVE panels were a bought-in product brought into the country by Michelle Sheehan and sold through the S&S counter, trailer and mail-order desk. Nothing about a JIVE panel was made by Tiger Teeth, and a JIVE plate is not a Tiger Teeth product. The two lines sat side by side in one family's business and they are not the same thing.

A panel, in BMX usage, is a number plate or a plate insert — the trade this library covers in its Wizard Number Plates chapter. JIVE was a clothing and number plate label started in Belfast in the late 1980s by Will Smyth and the group of friends who went by the Jive Five. They cut plates by hand at night in Rick Hall's house, sponsored the American rider Dave Clymer because he ran a Dead Kennedys sticker on his number plate, and gave the sport the word nac-nac by way of a BMX Action photo caption. Smyth went on to found DIG. That chapter is here.

This page used to stop short of stating that connection flat, because no document named JIVE and S&S together. That hedge is no longer needed. Bill Ryan, who took delivery of one of the panels himself, states firsthand that Michelle Sheehan imported them and got them out to riders — and separately, BMX Action's Probe column for March 1989 lists a Jive Panel in the component list for Kevin Hull's customized Brackens. The testimony supplies the route; the magazine page supplies a date and a bike. They are two different kinds of evidence and the JIVE chapter keeps them apart.

One wrinkle of geography stays on the record rather than being tidied: JIVE was based in Belfast, which is in Northern Ireland, where the Supercross account says Ireland. American writing of that era routinely collapsed the two.

What the detail tells you is scope. A family shop outside Austin was running a transatlantic supply line, and the plates it landed ended up under the staff of the biggest BMX magazine in the country. That is not a hobby operation.

The 2020 reissue

Tiger Teeth got an unusual second act.

In 2020, Supercross BMX — whose connection to the Sheehans runs back to S&S being one of its very first dealers — wanted an original-style chainwheel for its 30th anniversary bikes. Rather than simply copy the design, Supercross went and asked. Michelle Sheehan gave her blessing to replicate it, and the reissue was released as the Tiger Teeth Ryan Sheehan Tribute Chainwheel.

The replica differs from the original in a way worth recording precisely, so nobody mistakes one for the other in thirty years:

• Material — 7075 T-6 billet, where the originals were 6061.
• Tooth pattern — 3/32 inch.
• Spindle — drilled for 19mm, suiting old-school cranks of the Profile and Redline type.
• Sizes — 33, 41, 44 and 47 tooth, the 44 being the half of the familiar 44/16 gear and the 47 for riders running 47/17.
• Shipping — from September 20, 2020.

The reason any of them reached the public is mundane and rather charming: the machine shop had minimum order quantities, Supercross did not build as many anniversary bikes as it had to order chainwheels, and the overage went on sale rather than into a box.

Where the record runs thin

• Founding and closing dates. Neither is documented. Tiger Teeth sits inside the S&S window of the 1980s into the early 1990s and no source narrows it further.
• Whether Tiger Teeth was ever a separate legal company or simply a product name used by S&S. The sources describe it as a company Ryan talked his mother into starting, but we found no registration, no separate address and no letterhead.
• The shape of the JIVE import. That the panels came from JIVE of Belfast, and that Michelle Sheehan imported them and got them out to riders, is settled per Bill Ryan firsthand. The years the importing ran, the volume and the terms are still not recorded anywhere. Set out in full in the JIVE chapter. It was an S&S line, not a Tiger Teeth one.
• Who machined the chainwheels. No shop, no supplier, no location.
• Production numbers, and the full size and design range. The 39 to 47 tooth span comes from a collector reference, not a catalog. The exact relationship between the tri-blade and multi-hole designs — which came first, whether they overlapped — is described inconsistently and we are not picking a version.
• Period advertising. Not verified. The oldschoolmags.com archive of BMX Plus! stops at 1989, which appears to sit just before Tiger Teeth's most active stretch.
• Sponsored riders. Whether Tiger Teeth backed anyone beyond the S&S team is unknown.

BMXmuseum.com's reference entry on the chainrings would not load for us on repeated attempts; its text reached us through search indexes rather than the page itself, and we are flagging that rather than overstating what we read.

Sources

Supercross BMX, supercrossbmx.com — Tiger Teeth Ryan Sheehan Tribute Chainwheel product page; source for the founding account, the Bitchin' Bolts to chainwheels to JIVE panels sequence, S&S as one of the first Supercross dealers, Michelle Sheehan's blessing for the reissue, the 6061 versus 7075 T-6 material comparison, the 3/32 tooth pattern, the 19mm spindle drilling, the 33 / 41 / 44 / 47 tooth sizes, the machine shop minimums, and the September 20, 2020 ship date. BMXmuseum.com — reference entry 4521, S&S Tiger Teeth Chainrings; source for S&S as Sheehan & Sheehan Racing, the Round Rock / Pflugerville / Austin location, the 1980s to early 1990s window, Bitchin' Bolts as crank bolts, pedal cages and race gear and bags, the 39 to 47 tooth range, raw and chrome finishes, and the two chainring designs (page not directly loadable; text obtained through search indexes). BMXmuseum.com for-sale listing 750425 — a chrome 42-tooth example listed as a Tiger Tooth mid-school sprocket, showing the name variant and an additional size. Will Smyth interview, Deathless Avenue, July 2019, also carried by Profile Racing — source for JIVE as a Belfast BMX clothing and number plate label, the plates made at night in Rick Hall's house, and the Dave Clymer sponsorship. BMX Action, Probe column, March 1989 — “The Sheep Dogmobile: Kevin Hull's Customized Brackens,” photographed October 1988; the printed component list carries the line “CLAMP PLATE: Jive Panel.” Bill Ryan, founder of Supercross BMX, 2026 — first-hand recollection that Tiger Teeth started out of S&S, and of JIVE plates and panels reaching the American scene. Bill Ryan, firsthand, August 2026 — source for Michelle Sheehan being the person who imported the JIVE panels and got them out to riders, which is what allows this page to drop its earlier hedge; the import is recorded here as an S&S line rather than a Tiger Teeth one. bmxsociety.com and oldschoolmags.com were checked for period advertising and forum documentation; bmxsociety returned only a general sprocket identification thread and oldschoolmags returned no Tiger Teeth material.

Last reviewed: August 2026. This chapter will be updated as additional source material becomes available.