LOWRIDER, HIGH HOPES

As popularity balloons, Build-A-Bike's customers have become a mix of all ethnicities and age brackets, and for a while, there was even a 52-year-old guy from Sanderson Ford, a longtime bike collector, who was coming in two, three times a week to drool over all the custom parts.

Cliff Tyler is Morris' fianc‚, and he learned most of what he knows at dad's gas station, where if you didn't have the tool you needed, you made one. He gets about as excited as some of the kids do about the bikes, and he keeps a spiral notebook in which he jots down ideas. Today, he's working on another one--a sissy-bar that shoots down from the rear of the seat, with blinking lights.

"All this stuff's been done before, if you think about it," Tyler says. "It's one thing to think of an idea, but to actually make it work, that's the challenge. That's what I like about it."

And that's what he tells the kids. Don't just get the latest thing. Lead the way, if you can. Innovations don't stay exclusive for long.

Before all of that can happen, though, old frames must be sanded free of old paint so new paint will stick. Lowbikers often weld shaped metal plates to their frames or add cut-to-fit cardboard with bondo, a putty mixed with a hardener for body filling. After sanding off rough edges and spraying it with primer, the frame is ready for painting and whatever else the lowbikers have dreamed up.

"There are no rules," Morris says. "The people that come in here are so creative. Dads are building bikes for their kids, and they come in and see one of these and go, 'Wow, a 26-inch frame.' People now are talking about [creating] a second bike."

Lowrider Bicycle features a how-to section spelling out some processes, but those and the more elaborate, prize-winning alterations aren't exactly do-it-yourself material for youngsters. "It comes down to the people who have access to welding and machines," says tech editor Vargas, who, at 23, has claimed a few trophies himself. "I have complete access to a machine shop. I've built several feature bikes with a budget of $600. We did all the work ourselves. But then you have other kids--one guy spent $2,200, and it still wasn't as good as some of the ones we did for $600."

And so this is what a kid like James Cano is up against out there. Morris and Tyler, then, when they planned a lowrider-bike show along with the Valley's Seductive Car Club, wanted a less exclusive atmosphere. They decided to start, first off, by replacing the $15-to-$25 entry fee typically charged at big-name shows with a $2 fee and canned food for Westside Food Bank.

The kids wander the aisles at the Build-A-Bike/Seductive Car Club bike show in January, bestowing pronouncements of sorriness and badness on 64 bikes from around the Valley. Marvin Martian murals, mini champagne glasses, eight-ball themes, Southwestern chic . . . and there's a three-wheeler with a wicker basket riding its back, planted amid a picnic-style display of Coca-Cola memorabilia, pitcher and glasses, a bucket of grapes and apples. "That's bad, huh?" one kid with a Boyz Wit Toyz bike-club cap says to another. "Like if you rode it to the park, huh?"

Morris scrambles to the mike and warns that official judging will begin in five minutes; all preparations must be completed now. She praises the large turnout. "This is the best day of my life," she says as she comes down.

For James Cano, the show is a welcome distraction. Sometimes his attitude toward his bike doesn't carry over into school, and after he and his mom visited his ailing grandmother in Mexico last fall, he got into trouble for fighting with a classmate. He says the guy had taunted him about his ancestry. Both were suspended, but with the time James had already missed in Mexico, he had too many absences to finish the semester.

He's hoping, nervously, that his father will make it to the show; so many other dads are here, and his father's son by his new marriage had expressed some interest in getting into lowrider bikes, too.

Arizona has never seen more lowrider bikes in one place. Just the same, more formidable competition will appear in about six weeks, at the annual show in Mesa. A pudgy guy in a black tee shirt struts around harrumphingly, a member of Phoenix's Prestige car and bike club. He tells one of today's participants he's got a bike he's poured $2,000 into, but he's saving it for the big-name show in Mesa.

James is out of earshot when the big guy finds "Wicked" at the end of the third row of bikes. "See that little hole in the fender there?" Pudgy says to the other guy. "All those things, little things, in a big show, are points taken away. But a lot of judges don't know what they're looking for. Little show like this."

At 2 p.m., the clipboard-armed judges--Cliff Tyler of Build-A-Bike, one of Seductive Car Club's co-presidents and a guy who does gold dipping for the store--begin. A hydraulic carhop is staged out front to occupy the youngsters. Bikes are divided into categories to distinguish between, say, a fully customized bike like the Black Widow or an all-original-parts Schwinn like Wicked. The Seductive co-president is serene, expressionless, judging from a standing distance. Tyler's style is more intense, on his haunches, studied looks under lifted sunglasses.