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.

JIVE panels from Ireland

The third thing Tiger Teeth did was import. Supercross BMX's account says that after the bolts and the chainwheels, the family started bringing in JIVE panels from Ireland.

We have to be straight about the limits here: that single sentence is the only source we located on JIVE. We could not establish what company made them, what a JIVE panel actually was, or what years the importing ran. In BMX usage a panel most often means a number plate or plate insert — the trade this library covers in its Wizard Number Plates chapter — but we are not going to state that as fact on one unsupported reading. It is flagged below.

What the detail does tell you is scope. A family shop outside Austin was running a transatlantic supply line in the early 1990s. 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.
• What JIVE panels were, and who made them. One sentence in one source, and nothing else anywhere we looked.
• 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. Bill Ryan, founder of Supercross BMX, 2026 — first-hand recollection that Tiger Teeth started out of S&S. 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.