A BMXRacingHistory.com chapter · hosted on Legend Bike Co

Voris Dixon Bikes

The Story of VDC — the Voris Dixon Company — 1979 to 1985

The first thing Voris Dixon ever sold wasn't a frame. It was a 17 tooth sprocket nobody else would make — punched out in a buddy's tool shop and gone in half an hour at the track. That was the whole man right there: see the need, build the part, sell it before the day was out. Out of that came the Changa, the Gorila, the Chimp, and a Santa Ana shop that quietly built frames and bars for half the big names of the era. This is how VDC happened.

Here's the part that makes VDC different from almost every other shop on this site. Voris didn't pick a side. He built for Hutch and Robinson and Powerlite and Pro Neck and CW and Vector and Star Products, sometimes for riders who lined up against each other at the very same gate that weekend. On the track those brands were rivals. On the shop floor in Santa Ana, they were all just work. That's the story this page tells now — not just what VDC built under its own name, but who VDC quietly built for.

The name, first

VDC stands for Voris Dixon Company. You'll also see it written as Voris Dixon Bikes or Voris Dixon Cycles. Same outfit, three names. Voris ran it out of Anaheim, then Santa Ana, from about 1979 to 1985.

Where it started

Before VDC there was Bike Land, a shop in Anaheim that Voris part-owned. It sponsored a little race team at a track down the road — same neighborhood that gave you Steve Rink's Pedal Power, which became Powerlite, and Gary Turner doing his early frame work. A lot came out of that one patch of Southern California.

And the first thing VDC ever sold wasn't a frame. It was a 17 tooth sprocket for the Bendix coaster brake hub. Bendix didn't make one. So Voris got a buddy at Executive Tool Inc. to punch a Sturmey Archer sprocket down to fit the Bendix internals, drove the first batch out to the inaugural ABA Winter Nationals in Phoenix, and sold 300 of them in about half an hour. That's how you know there was a need.

B & D Sales, 1979 to 1981

Voris shut Bike Land and went in with Von Bandoyan from Executive Tool. They called it B & D Sales — Bandoyan and Dixon. Seat posts and sprockets, mostly. Seventeen grand the first year, eighty grand by year three, then the two of them split.

The Changa, the Gorila, the Chimp — VDC's own house brand, 1981 onward

The first frame with the VDC name on it was the Changa, a 20-inch, around 1981. Then the Changa Long. Then the Gorila, then the Chimp. There was a 24-inch Gorila cruiser too, and a 16-inch pit bike.

The thing that made a VDC a VDC was the dual pierced down tube — two parallel tubes that ran clean through the head tube instead of stopping at it. To pull that off Voris ran a 5-inch head tube, went with 3/4-inch seat stays where most everybody else used 5/8, and ran road-bike cable guides for the rear brake. The fork was a straight-drop, copied off Chuck Robinson's Robinson Racing forks. He didn't hide that. It worked, so he used it.

By his own count Voris built about 500 Changas and somewhere around 1,000 frames total across the whole VDC house-brand line — separate from everything he built under other names, which is where the real volume was.

The job shop — the client list

Here's the part that tells you why VDC matters more than its own frame counts let on. The real money was contract work — Voris building under everybody else's name, for a client list that reads like a who's-who of brands that spent the early 1980s racing against each other on the track:

Brand	What VDC built	Source
Hutch	Handlebars and other early parts	Voris Dixon, on the record
Powerlite	24-inch and some 20-inch forks, plus the "power bend" CW Pro-style bars built for Steve Rink	Voris Dixon, on the record
Pro Neck	The whole National Pro frame line, built for Mike Scurto	Voris Dixon, on the record
Robinson	Handlebars, built for Chuck Robinson	Voris Dixon, on the record
Star Products / Star BMX	Greg Hill's father's brand — Voris built the whole line, out of True Temper tubing, in 500-frame lots	Voris Dixon, on the record
CW	Oval-tube forks, after Roger Worsham spotted them sitting on the VDC shop floor	Voris Dixon, on the record
Wisconsin Cycle (the Traker — also seen written Trakker)	The Traker frames, built for Sharon Barons	Voris Dixon, on the record
Tuf-Neck, West Coast Cycles	Aluminum handlebars and seat posts, by the truckload	Voris Dixon, on the record
Vector	Aluminum handlebars, made from 2024 aluminum	Voris Dixon, on the record
Huffy	A high volume of seat posts, sized with the minimum-insertion mark Huffy required. Bill Ryan's own recollection adds broader custom project work for Huffy beyond the seat posts — his account, not yet independently confirmed	Voris Dixon, on the record (seat posts) · Bill Ryan, firsthand (broader custom work)
S&M	An early handlebar built for Chris Moeller, ahead of what became S&M's own Slam Bar — a collector account names Voris Dixon as the builder of that early bar and of Star Products' GHP bar	Collector record, snakebitebmx.com
Free Agent	By Voris's own account, he funded the original operation and built the frames while Yvonne Shoup ran the business — see the contested-ownership detail below and on the Free Agent page. Bill Ryan's account separately lists Free Agent among VDC's contract clients "for a little while"	Voris Dixon, on the record (contested) · Bill Ryan, firsthand
Woody Itson's early signature bars	Voris built Woody Itson's flatland bars before Hutch signed Woody away with better pay. Hutch then built its own separate, later version of the bar rather than continuing to buy it from VDC	Voris Dixon, on the record

Bill Ryan's own memory of the shop floor lines up with almost all of this, and he adds Trakker, Vector, Huffy, and Woody Itson's bars from having watched VDC work while he was building his own frame there in 1982 and 1983. Where his account and the documented record land on slightly different specifics — the Woody Itson bars, for one, were built for Woody himself before his move to Hutch, not built by VDC for Hutch directly — both are given rather than picking one silently. This list is not exhaustive. Voris Dixon built for more shops than anyone has fully catalogued, and Bill has said as much himself.

SpinFree, and the Free Agent question

The SpinFree hub was Voris's own freewheel-style rear hub, built around a swappable Bendix sprocket with a one-way clutch bearing — and it was on the market before Shimano rolled out its Freehub.

Then there's Free Agent, which is the loose end nobody's tied off. By Voris's own telling he put up the original $1,000 to Yvonne Shoup, came up with the name "Free Agent," told her he'd build the frames while she ran things, and says he still has paperwork showing half ownership and that he was never paid out. That's his account. We're handing it to you as that, not as the final word. Full writeup on the Free Agent chapter.

How big VDC got, and how it ended

At the top, in 1985, VDC had 19 employees and was running about $750,000 a year — and most of that was contract work, not VDC-branded frames. 1985 was also the last year Voris owned it. He sold to a guy who ran it into the ground fast and finally held a liquidation auction in Gary Turner's parking lot in Huntington Beach. Of all places. After that Voris pulled up to Puyallup, Washington and went to work for Jim Martinson building racing wheelchairs.

Bill Ryan's firsthand standing — the Hi-Tech BMX connection

This is the part I lived, and it's worth saying plainly: I was there. In 1982, Randy Rizzo introduced Voris Dixon to a 13-year-old me, and the two of us started Hi-Tech BMX — its own company, run out of my bedroom in Cypress, California. We built 25 frames before a naming-conflict legal threat made me shut it down at 15. The design later turned into the National Pro once Mike Scurto put that center brace in between the top and down tubes. The Hi-Tech frame got a new-products write-up in BMX Plus! back in January 1984. And to be clear — Hi-Tech and VDC were never the same brand. Same Voris, two companies. Hi-Tech isn't in the client table above for that reason: it was a partnership I was part of, not a job VDC did for somebody else's brand.

There's a wider detail here too, and it's the other half of my firsthand standing on this page. In that same 1982/83 window, Voris's shop wasn't only where Hi-Tech got built — it was also where Billy Farrell built the frame that became HYPER. Two teenagers, two frames, one shop, at the same time, and each of them walked out with the start of a brand (correspondence between Bill Farrell Sr. and Bill Ryan, 2020–2021, on file with Legend Bike Co).

Where VDC stands today

Originals turn up on bmxmuseum.com. A clean Changa, a Changa Long, one of the handful of Chimps or pit bikes that survived — those get collected. The dual-pierce is the giveaway every time. And it shows back up years down the road in S&M Bikes's 1994 Menstrual Cycle.

VDC was never the biggest brand of its era. What it was, was one of the most important contract shops in BMX through the whole boom — the fabricator behind rivals who never had to know they shared a builder. Not the same thing as being the biggest name, and arguably the bigger deal.

Sources

BMX Icons // Voris Dixon Interview, conducted by Jay Stark, hosted at snakebitebmx.com — the primary source for this chapter. Snakebitebmx.com, "BMX Handlebars // Through the Years" — collector sourcing on the early S&M bar and the GHP Star Bar, both credited to Voris Dixon. BMXmuseum.com brand pages and reference entry for Voris Dixon. Vintage BMX museum entry, vintagebmx.com/museum/vdc4.htm. 23mag.com VDC brand profile. UtahBMX.com forum thread "Voris Dixon interview." For the detail that Voris's shop was also where Billy Farrell built the first HYPER frame, in the same period as Hi-Tech: correspondence between Bill Farrell Sr. and Bill Ryan, 2020–2021, on file with Legend Bike Co. Bill Ryan, firsthand, 2026: the Hi-Tech BMX partnership with Voris Dixon, and his own recollection of VDC's client list, marked throughout as his account where it goes beyond the Voris Dixon interview.