About Solid Surf
Solid Surf is an authentic surf company. True to its roots from day one and never forgetting our purpose, to build the right board for the right surfer. Whether it be standing in the shaping room watching the board take shape or being across the world watching the live shaping cam on our website, we encourage our customers to be part of the shaping experience from outline to artwork to finish and everything in between.
In a day where people are expected to go to a shop filled with generic boards shaped to potentially capitalize on the general population altering what they were looking for and settle on the dimensions sitting on a rack, Solid Surf was born. Every once in a while when you go into a shop and pluck a board from the rack your stoked and the board is actually what you wanted, but more often than not you get a board because you finally got some cash together and you just need a new board and then you are ultimately disappointed and stuck with what you just spent your hard earned money on. The sensible route is to work with your local shaper, the one who knows where you surf and has an interest, business wise and on a personal level, to build the right board for you. Typically you can get a better board for a better price and with a small upfront deposit if you work with a shaper, you will have to have patience, but everything good takes time.
Dan O’Hara, shaper, founded Solid Surf in 2004 barely out of high school by ironing “Solid” graphics onto t-shirts in his bedroom. Months later his father bought him a surfboard blank for his 18th birthday and since then shaping has put Dan under the wing of many surfboard builders all over the world. Traveling and working with shapers all over has given Dan the opportunity to see how boards are shaped slightly different for different breaks and what a board needs to shine in a specific condition. Dan has worked with high performance shortboard and big wave gun shaper, Charles Williams of Impact Surfboards, retro surfboard shaper, Micheal Shermeyer of Shred Styx, longboard and funboard shaper, Tommy Bunger of Bunger Surfboards and fish and longboard shaper Steve Dunham. The combined experience (over 150yrs) of these world renowned shapers have influenced Dan’s shaping style giving him the ability to create any board for any wave and any surfer, and would be more than willing to shape the next right board for you.
Today, all of our boards are constructed by the best materials on the market, no expense spared. Our EPS foam blanks are cut and built in house to give us limitless options for experimentation for optimal performance. Our PU cores are only the best, widely tested and proven by board builders and surfers everywhere. The board is then shaped based on models that have been tested and proven by a wide range of surfers and conditions and built for our clients at customized dimensions based on their ability and build. Boards are then meticulously glassed by hand using only the best polyester and epoxy resins, by Silmar and Resin Research. All of our boards feature the FCS Fusion plug system, the strongest and most precise fin system on the market today, allowing our customers to have a huge range of fin templates to maximize their boards potential. The boards are finally sanded and finished by hand preserving the integrity and glass of the final product.
At the end of the day, we surf too and when we aren’t we are working to build the best boards for our friends and fellow watermen.