I’ve spent the last few weeks prepping to put Formica atop my fascia. I was hoping for a truly professional look. In preparation. I mounted a 1/8″ hardboard fascia as backing. I reinforced the top and bottom edges of the hardboard by laminating additional strips of 1/8″ hardboard to the backs of the original hardboard. These reinforcing strips would also act as a guide for the bearing on a router flush trim bit. I bought a 30″ x 144″ sheet of black Formica and glued it to the fascia backing with contact cement. I trimmed the Formica with a Harbor Freight trim router with a Skil flush trim bit. Everything went good up until the trimming. What a disaster. I totally botched the trim job and it was super messy.
I attribute the botched trimming to a few reasons.
- I didn’t have a suitable guide for the router bit bearing. Maybe I should have installed a half inch of reinforcing strips, the problem I was running into is I couldn’t always get them to match up.
- The Harbor Freight router. The bit slipped from the collet twice. The face slipped numerous times.
- The Skil flush trim bit has an 1/8″ gap between the bearing and the blade. And naturally the 1/8″ hardboard fell into this gap several times, causing chip outs.
Now what to do. I don’t think I’ll ever be happy if I don’t fix the problem, so my options are:
- File out the small imperfections as best I can and cover the major ones with a smaller “trim” strip of Formica.
- Remove the fascia and do it over again. With or without Formica.
I’m leaning toward just ripping this out and going with a hardboard fascia.
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I tried the SeamFil and wasn’t too impressed. I’m going to settle with my flaws and move on.
See my blog posting: SeamFil Formica Repair
Yeah I’m going to try and salvage the Formica. I bought a belt sander, brought out my big Skil Router, and ordered SeamFil for the chips. I’m moving forward. I also posted a video to show where I am right now.
http://youtu.be/g00r6iqhtBs
A third option repairing with SeamFil