1983 – 1986
Cruisin’ and racin’ the mighty P.K. Ripper.
Despite needing a slight restoration and a good clean, this bad-boy has been well used but in great condition and has all the right elements for racing and casual urban riding.
I started riding with a black CCM, steel and heavy as hell, but I made it look good. Then I started buying BMX magazines, and the addiction was underway. I discovered S.E. Racing and fell in love with the P.K. Ripper. One seriously bad-ass bike — tough as hell, and uncommon due to the high cost of entry — perfect for the guy who likes to make a presence at the track. I bought components that were sleek racing products and married them to this bitchin’ frame marketed for tricks and jumps and rugged use. It was rare to see another Ripper on the track, and when you did you figured the guy kinda knew what he was doing. They all ran big wide rims with meaty tires, but I had the opposite. Very cool.
I sourced the parts from various retailers, mostly Cycle Path, and Rockville BMX in Maryland, with only the cranks coming from California. Rockville BMX was the God on the east coast, I still have a couple of their catalogs, pretty rare to find, and in really good condition.
The bike represents the first time in my life that I saw something needlessly top-of-the-line and had to have it anyway, and on the day I picked it up there was a crowd of kids standing around checking it out. The shape and frame structure seemed to prioritize function over form, with the chunky, unique welding around the joins gave it a presence, like it was there to take anything you could give it.
I, on the other hand, only offered it an approach more on the Disney side than the kind of abuse it deserved, but I rather enjoyed using it as an urban bike, between street and mountain. Arai Racing rims, Bullseye hubs, Profile cranks, Hutch pedals and stacked with the rare cammo padding, it was light and fast and strong and I loved it. I raced it and won many and have the trophies to show for it. Half the joy of owning the bike was riding to the track, which when I lived in Meadowvale, was in Milton. I rode through the beautiful bike baths all the way up to Winston Churchill (the edge of the countryside in 1985) and then the country roads out to Derry and the track.
As my only bike, and rightfully so, I used it for every conceivable use of travel, and getting to the tracks made me realize that I had some endurance and that I enjoyed discovering new places on bike. It enabled me to get to lots of new and interesting places in a relatively short amount of time and was the precursor to even longer journeys by motorcycle or car later in life. One of the strangest spur-of-the-moment journeys was from my home in Bellefountain, near Caledon, to my dad’s house in Toronto at Danforth and Chester.
The king of the sport was R.L. Osborn, whom I met at the Toronto International Centre in 1985 at a BMX sport bike show. I found myself standing next to the BMX Action trick ramp, just staring at his bike, like I had discovered a unicorn and was trying to register it in my brain. Then in a moment of perfect serendipity, he was called away for something and came over and asked me to hold the bike and watch it for him for a few minutes. He actually talked to me, but then left me with his ‘other half’, this awesome conglomerate of precious metals assembled specifically by him so that he could do the thing that he did better than anyone else, and which was emblazoned across the pages of most of my magazines. It was like holding Jimi Hendrix’s guitar. The cherry on top was when he returned, he thanked me and gave me a photo and signed it right there in front of me. My hero.
Some rare original parts docs and receipts
