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THE SHOP You have just arrived at 329 Main Street, Seal Beach, California, and the home of Harbour Surfboards. Let's take a guided tour of the longest running surfboard show room in the world! |
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This is your first look as you walk in the door. There is an amazing collection of vintage Harbour Surfboards hanging from the ceiling and the piece de resistance is the first board on the right, Harbour #18. This board was shaped and glassed by Rich Harbour in his parent's garage in 1960. |
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Pan to the right and see the great selection of things to buy. |
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Robert Howson, the owner of the retail store greets you. | |
| You are standing behind the counter looking at the left wall and a row of surfboards. |  |
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Check out all of the goodies for sale in between. | |
| Just past the main show room is a room that has used boards and sold boards on the right. On the back wall is the fun board selection. |  |
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THE SHAPE ROOM Owned and operated by Rich Harbour, you are entering the oldest existing shaping facility in the world. As you will see, we do things the Harbour way and that probably is not like you have ever seen before. |
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Harbour Surfboards are glued at Clark foam to specific rockers that match our deck rockers.
This ensures that very little deck foam will be removed. This is an extremely important part of our system. Foam gets very soft past 1/8" deep. Over-shaping to adjust deck rocker is a major contributor of deck delaminations. |
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| On the right blanks await their turn in the shaping bay. |  |
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This is where the board happens. Rich is putting an outline on this board.
These are full-length half templates. The router insures an exact copy of the template. |
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| The main man puts on some fine rails. |  |
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Rich has over ten block planes all set at different depths for different parts of the finishing.
We have a Japanese blade sharpening system to keep all of the blades razor sharp. |
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| Here's Tim Stamps, Harbour shaper. |  |
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This is a finished shaped blank. It is perfectly sculpted, ready for the final glassing. | |
| A 5-horse power 80-gallon air compressor supplies the air. |  |
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This is the blank storage to the right of the compressor. | |
| This unique storage system was invented, engineered, and built by Rich Harbour.
In an area 14 feet by 5 feet we are able to store 102 rough shaped surfboards. They are housed in 3 trays that are suspended from the ceiling on tracks. No one can touch them until the tray is pulled out. |
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Out the back in the alley is a delivery from Clark Foam. | |
| We hope you have enjoyed the shop tour and maybe some day we will see you in person to really check us out. | ||
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