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Bertram31.com General Bulletin Board
Re: Interior materials advice needed
Posted By: Vic Roy In Response To: Re: Interior materials advice needed (Capt Patrick McCrary)
Date: Tuesday, 14 December 2004, at 4:26 p.m.
John, I'm not much of a carpenter (damn good welder tho) but have done a lot of laminate work on stuff over the years. It is actually dirt simple. Like Patrick says, a few basic tricks that a book will teach, but I'll save you a trip to the book store:
Trick #1: make sure the plywood you are about to laminate the Formica to is smooth and level - sand with say #120 and fill any big voids in the surface with Bondo;
Trick #2: cut the Formica with a fine tooth blade in a table saw or saber saw to about 1" larger than the plywood, as it is real hard to get a smooth cut on the Formica with a saw;
Trick #3: Coat both the plywood and the underside of the Formica with contact cement, using a brush and let it dry to where it is just slightly tacky - don't rush, let it dry;
Trick #4: Once the two contact cement surfaces touch, it's bonded, no moving it around, so you want to suspend the Formica over the plywood and press it down a little at a time, so, the silver bullet trick:
Trick #5: take some poly rope, like ski rope, and place it on the plywood after the contact cement has dried in a "S" pattern and put the Formica on top of the rope. Then carefully press the end of the Formica down to contact the plywood and start pulling the poly rope out - slowly, letting the two surfaces contact. Once you have all the rope pulled and the Formica is fully contacted with the plywood, take a roller and press the Formica down firmly and you are done laminating. It would not hurt to do this on some scrap in small doses first, but it really is duck soup.
Trick #6: Trimming the Formica to the plywood, probably the most fun as it's so easy it's child's play. Get a good router and a Formica trim blade (has a ball bearing on the bottom of the blade to run along the edge of the plywood) and just trim it up. Does a perfect job every time if you go pretty slow, but too slow will burn the Formica, but easy as pie.
Patrick is right as usual, plywood is cheap, Formica is cheap, contact cement is cheap and once you get the hang of it, easy way to make very nice stuff. One caution, remember that Formica does not like water and sunlight, so make sure you paint it if it's out in the weather.
UV
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