History of CW

Information on the history of CW and the BMX models they produced is hard to come by! 

Below is the history of CW that I have been able to discover so far.

In 1979 Roger Worsham owned a bike shop called Coast Wheels, this was located in Yorba Linda which is a small town next to Anaheim in California. 

Roger's first BMX team was Coast Wheels racing. Chris Blackburn was an original Coast Wheels team member, so were Chris Scott, Tony Swain and Henry Moreno. Also Robert Swick may have been on the Coast Wheels team.

Roger then started a bmx manufacturing company in the early 80's which became CW Racing. 

 CW stood for Custom Works. Although because Roger owned both companies a lot of people got confused and thought it stood for Coast Wheels, which was his bike shop. But it never did. And basically Roger switched his interest to CW racing and sold the Coast Wheels bike shop to Andy Zirzow's dad.

The manufacturing location of CW, I think in was in Anaheim, Fullerton, or Brea. Roger's brother was a welder for him on the original manufacturing. Eventually though, all of the manufacturers started going to Tawain for the bike frames.

CW closed down in 1995.

Most of the racers who were on Coast Wheels became riders for CW Racing. CW had the factory riders who won national races, and supported riders who did above average locally. However, most of the Coast Wheels riders were older and quit BMX racing around the time Roger started CW.

Roger was great at attracting the local talent in Orange county to CW. Who also did well nationally. He seemed to find the great local talent just before they made the big time nationally. For instance Billy Griggs.

So the CW team consisted of Robert Swick (eventually went to Redline in his late teens. Was a great rider on CW from about age 8 through 12), Mark "Bruno" Wilson who was one of the first to score 10,000 pts on the old ABA system. I think Jason Jenson was only the other person to do it at the time, and Andy Zirzow.

Roger Worsham then co-owned CW / Revcore with Bill Bellis. Bill Bellis was also the the money man behind Hutch. Revcore of course was the racing company that manufactured extreme high quality American made frames that we all loved so much. I've never known anyone to crack a Revcore frame.

Around the time Hutch was turned over to Bellis, Roger Worsham wanted out of the bike business and sold his half of CW / Revcore to Bellis.

Bellis was now the owner of CW / Revcore and Hutch. This was sometime between 1988 -1989. As of today, Bill Bellis still owns the CW, Revcore and the Hutchins names.

Q. Regarding Revcore, what came first CW or Revcore? Was one bought by the other or were they essentially the same company? I heard that CW was first and that CW created Revcore to make high quality racing frames (which they certainly did!).

A. CW came before Revcore. The company was named Custom Works and was started around 1979. CW pretty much just became Revcore. Sort of just a "fresh up ". As a matter of fact there were some stickers on some of the bikes that actually read Revcore CW on the same sticker.

And here's an odd piece of trivia for you. I hear that in 1986 both CW and Hutch made some skateboards. Look here.

Chris Blackburn who was on the CW support team recalls:- ""

"We all drove to the national in Washington state in January, I think maybe in 1980 or 1981. I think Andy was a 15x at the time. Robert Swick was like a 10x. Bruno Wilson I think was 11 or 12. I was about 13 or 14.

We all rode up in a van with Roger driving. It was a great trip. Mike Miranda I think was a 16x and a friend of Andy Zirzow's. Mike was not on the team, but came with us. He did well at that national race and Roger offered him the opportunity to be on CW. He really made a name for himself when he turned A Pro and won everything in site.

I eventually became friends with Pete Loncarevich and his family. I really admired him. I like to think that my being on CW and always saying good things about Roger may have led Pete to eventually come to CW. I never confirmed it with him though. He came to CW later when I was sort of phasing out of bmx heavily."

"Andy Zirzow was really into art. He actually came up with the idea of the W connecting to the C. He first made the logo out of contact paper or yellow shelf paper. He put it on his Bell Moto 3 helmet which we all had. And although it was never specifically said because Roger didn't want to have to change the name of the frames if a rider left or quit the team, but the Z frame was unoffically named in his honor. There was also a RS frame in lieu of Robert Swick.

Roger Moore was on CW when he was winning everything when he was like 5. His family owned a bike shop in Phoenix AZ. At the time, Jeff Moten was also on the team. He used to compete locally with Jason Wharton. Clarence "Earthquake" Perry was also on the team back then. He was a great rider from Washington state. He used to race cruisers."

"It was cool having Billy Griggs on the team. I used to try to learn from him. He was a great racer. He used to always compete against a local guy named Brian Gass. For some reason, Gass never seemed to make it on the national level where was Billy did. But it was always a heated local competition between them.

There was another guy on the team who I used to race against. His name was Jim Mock. When we were 16, he was winning all the local races in our age class. I would come in 2nd behind him many times. And a few times would beat him."

"I used to read all those BMX actions from back then. Hoping some day I would be in them too. I was in a few of the original CW ads since my dad did the photography for them."