Webco

Picture a motorcycle parts company in Venice, California — already 20 years deep in the business, building fast parts for guys who raced in the dirt. Then a bunch of kids start beating up their Sting-Rays in the empty lots down the road, and that same company is one of the very first to stop and build them a real frame. That's Webco. It was there before almost anybody, and it was a straight line from the motorcycle world into the BMX world — a story that keeps turning up wherever you look at how this sport got started. Breithaupt came out of MX. So did Alexander. So did Esser. So did Webco.

The motorcycle company: 1954–1973

Three men started Webco in 1954: Tom Heininger, Bob Hughes, and Harry Weber. The name comes from Weber's last name, probably with a bit of "company" tacked on. Heininger and Hughes had met over at Offenhauser — one of the biggest names in Indy car engine parts back then — and they figured they could do the same thing for motorcycles. So that's what they did. First product line was high-performance racing engine parts for bikes. Their first catalog ran 10 pages, staple-bound, punched to fit a binder, summer of 1955. You started somewhere.

Through the '60s and into the '70s, Webco turned into one of the most popular aftermarket and accessory outfits in American motorcycling. Cylinder heads, pistons, big-bore kits, handlebars, rocker caps, layover sprockets, footpegs, helmets — they made all of it. They were the ones who brought the first full-coverage motorcycle helmets to the U.S. They backed local Southern California motocross racers, opened a couple of Honda dealerships in Los Angeles, and ran a nightly radio show during Daytona Bike Week with AMA announcer Roxy Rockwood that pulled live crowds of close to a thousand fans at the Hawaiian Inn. These guys were not small.

Heininger went on to run the Motorcycle Industry Council as president in 1972 and helped start the Motorcycle Safety Foundation. The AMA put him in its Motorcycle Hall of Fame in 2003. He passed away January 8, 2024, at 97. A long, full life in the sport.

The pivot to BMX: late 1973 or early 1974

Webco moved into bicycle frames somewhere around late 1973 or early 1974. Nobody's got the exact date written down — I've looked, and the sources just don't have it. But the timing makes total sense. Kids all over Southern California were already doing to their Sting-Rays exactly what the motocross guys did to their motorcycles, and Webco was sitting a short drive up the coast from the dirt lots where all of it was happening. They were already in the room.

And the engineering edge was the real deal. Webco knew chromoly tubing. They knew how to miter and weld a racing frame, knew how to think about geometry for hard, aggressive riding. All of that carried straight over to BMX. They built their own frames in-house — no badge job, no rebrand, the real thing — and those early Webco BMX frames ended up among the first production race bikes actually designed for the sport instead of just adapted to fit it. That matters.

It also puts Webco in rare company. In that 1974–1975 window, you could count the companies building purpose-made BMX frames on one hand: Redline (their first chromoly BMX forks shipped February 1, 1974), Mongoose (out of Skip Hess's BMX Products, Inc. in 1974), Webco, and a handful of local California builders. That early window set the tone for everything after. The bikes kids saw on the first covers of Bicycle Motocross News in 1973, and on the factory teams at the 1974 Yamaha Gold Cup — those bikes are what told everybody what the sport was supposed to look like.

The Team Replica and the product line

You can spot a Webco from 1974 through the late '70s by the gussets. Single head-tube gusset on the early ones, 1974 and 1975, and the designs kept evolving from there. And the gusset hole tells you the tubing. Oval hole means chromoly — the Team Issue, the Professional, the Expert, the Ultimate. Round hole means mild steel — the Replica and the Curb Jumper. Collectors have had that sorted for years, and it is the fastest way to know what you are actually holding. Serial numbers got stamped on the bottom bracket and started with a "W." Collectors still chase them down today, even though nobody's ever fully reconstructed the Webco serial-number records — the old-school guys will tell you straight up that nailing an exact year off the serial alone is a bit of a guessing game.

The best-known bike was the Webco Team Replica, out in late 1975 — but the name means what it says. It was the replica. The frame the team actually rode was the chromoly Team Issue, and that one has the oval gusset holes. There's a 1975 Team Replica sitting in the BMX Museum collection right now — original paint, original decals, an undrilled brake bridge, and a Redline non-drilled fork. That last detail tells you how tangled up these early brands really were. Redline made the forks on a whole lot of early Webcos.

The Professional, and the order of the chromoly models

Webco ran more than one chromoly model, and putting them in order has taken a while. Matthew Kelty, the reader who straightened out the tubing and gusset-hole tells on this page, wrote back in October 2026 with the model name he had been trying to place: the Professional. By his account the chromoly line ran Team / Pro, then Professional, then Ultimate. BMXmuseum's Webco Inc. listings support that the model is real — a Professional described as chromoly, built with a tube gusset instead of a plate gusset, and a Professional Mini alongside it. None of that moves the Team Issue, which is its own documented chromoly model with dated 1975 examples. Several chromoly models, not one.

Then there's the paint, and here the accounts flatly disagree. Kelty has the Ultimate in white and the earlier chromoly models in orange. Collector and forum testimony has it the other way around: the Expert all chromoly, oval hole, painted white, and the Ultimate oval hole, orange — including one account of a 1976 Ultimate in orange with Ashtabula forks and Webco mags. Both sides land on the same two colors. An oval gusset hole means a full chromoly frame, and original paint on those frames was either orange or white. The fight is over which model got which color, and no dated catalog scan has turned up to settle it. So both accounts go on the page and neither one gets called wrong.

Webco sold complete bikes, frame-and-fork sets, and components. Their ads ran through the late '70s and early '80s in BMX Action, BMX Plus!, and Super BMX. And the slogan — "Webco — Out Front to Stay" — was everywhere: stickers, ads, shirts, the whole run of the era.

International distribution and Nico Does

Pierre Karsmakers, a Dutch motocross racer who'd moved out to California in 1973 to ride for Yamaha USA, became Webco's European distributor in 1977. His Netherlands-based import business, Pierre Karsmakers USA Products BV, started bringing Webco bikes into Europe right alongside DG and Laguna BMX.

Then in 1979, Darwin Zenser — the guys who were there call him "the main man" at Webco — handed a factory sponsorship to Nico Does, son of Dutch BMX organizer Gerrit Does, who'd go on to co-found the IBMXF in 1981. And by his own father's account, Nico Does became the first factory-sponsored BMX rider from anywhere outside the United States.

The first international factory rider in the history of this sport was on a Webco. Let that sink in.

The other WEBCO: the West European Bicycle Company, 1991

There is a second WEBCO in BMX, and it belongs to the same rider. In 1991, Nico Does founded the West European Bicycle Company in the Netherlands — WEBCO, after the American brand that gave him his factory ride twelve years earlier. Note the name: West European, not Western. There is no corporate relationship to the Venice, California Webco whatsoever. Two separate companies, two separate countries, one shared name chosen on purpose.

The 1991 WEBCO factory team was Bas de Bever, Nico Does, Pieter Does, Scott Smith, and TJ Beach. Dale Holmes rode for them through 1992. Jamie Staff was on the 1995 WEBCO Mentos World Team. BMXmuseum carries the West European Bicycle Company as its own brand, with its own bike listings — a 1993 E-Type and a 1994 WEBCO 24 among them.

So the man who got the first international factory ride in BMX went on to name his own company after the brand that gave it to him.

The end of the original Webco: around 1982

Webco's BMX run wound down in the early '80s. The U.S. Webco Inc. folded around 1982. The brand name and the 20-inch frame jigs got picked up by Emory Bicycles, Inc. out of Jacksonville, Florida, who kept building Webco-branded frames for a little while after — and, unlike the original company, also made 26-inch cruisers wearing the Webco badge. Webco Inc. itself never built a 26-inch frame.

Emory is not a footnote, either. Emory Bicycles, Inc. is still trading today, family-owned, out of Jacksonville at emorybikes.com, building American-made cruisers and components and still putting out product in small quantities. The company grew out of Clayton-Willard Bicycles, which the Smith brothers started in Miami in 1944 and moved to Jacksonville in 1948. Clayton Smith founded the Emory brand, which began in 1976 with the Emory Mojave — claimed as the first purpose-built beach cruiser.

So here's the tell for collectors. Emory-built Webcos have their serial number on the head tube, starting with an F or an E. The original Webco Inc. frames have it on the bottom bracket, starting with a W. And if you're looking at a Webco 26-inch cruiser, it's an Emory. Every time.

Why the original Webco actually folded, nobody's fully written down. By 1982 the first BMX boom was already cooling off, and the bust of 1985 through 1988 was coming whether anybody liked it or not. Webco was hardly the only early brand that didn't make it through. Torker went into bankruptcy in November 1984. A big chunk of that 1977–1980 wave of brands was gone or swallowed up by 1988.

Legacy

It's easy to walk right past how much Webco mattered to BMX, mostly because the run was short — about eight years, 1974 to 1982 — and the company didn't live long enough to ride the wave that built today's collector market. But they were there at the very start, building real frames at a time when most outfits were still slapping BMX decals on Sting-Ray clones and calling it a day. They were one of the first to treat BMX like a serious sport worth motocross-grade engineering. They were the brand that gave out the first international factory ride this sport ever saw. And their frames — the Team Replica above all — are now genuine old-school pieces, trading among collectors at prices that say everything about how few of them are left.

And Webco belongs to a bigger story the sport almost never tells in one place: the motorcycle-to-BMX pipeline. Redline's Linn Kastan built speedway motorcycle frames before he ever built a BMX fork. Mongoose's Skip Hess came out of motorcycle parts. FMF started life as a motorcycle performance company. DG was a motorcycle brand. Webco was the oldest and most established of the whole bunch. The first real generation of BMX engineering came from people who already knew how to build a fast machine for the dirt. They just shrank it down to twenty inches. That's the whole secret, right there.