How to Install Laminate on Your Worktop || DIY Laminate Work Surfaces

this video was sponsored by skillshare hey remember last week when i built that sweet outfeed table and did the laminate top and i told you in the video that this week i do a video showing you just how to do laminate well welcome to this week so first i needed something to put laminate on and i thought this would be a great space on the saw to add a little extra storage so i made this little pull out cart but as you can see it doesn't have a top so i'm going to show you everything you need to know about laminating a surface i'm going to put a laminate top on this and walk you through the entire process but in case that's not good enough i'm also going to create a little bridge between this saw and this saw with a nice little laminate surface here so there's lots of things to laminate follow along enjoy the video check the video description i will link every single product that you need at home to do your own laminate all right let's do this [Music] now i'm sure you're probably asking what's the benefit to doing a laminate top versus a wood top or something else butcher block that sort of thing well there's actually a lot of benefits number one laminate is super silky smooth which means that especially for an outfeed table wood slides right across it number two glue doesn't stick to laminate this is what i have on my workbenches and it's awesome because i can do glue ups clamp them right down to the table top once the glue dries they just pop right off if you've got any glue that drips on there you use a putty knife boom scrapes right up it's easy to keep it nice and clean and smooth now you might be asking well why go through the hassle of laying my own laminate why don't i just buy some sheets of melamine you could do that but melamine in my opinion is an inferior product the layer of laminate on melamine is like half as thick as traditional laminate that you're going to put down yourself not only that with laminate you're able to put a hardwood edge around the entire thing which is going to make it last a lot longer and you're going to be less likely to get a bunch of chips around the perimeter of your work surface and on top of that it's just really fun to do and you can pick out whatever color and there's like 800 different options so just put your own laminate down melamine it's just kind of the cheaper less quality way to go okay so here are the basic tools that you're going to need to add laminate to any surface the nice thing about laminate is you don't need a lot of fancy specialty tools there's just a few items that are going to make the job a lot easier so you're going to want to pick up one of these this is a laminate scorer this is what's actually going to allow you to cut the laminate to the size that you want it to be now you can use an exacto knife in a pinch but this only costs a couple dollars and it works so much better than a exacto knife or a razor blade so pick up a laminate score you're going to want a laminate roller now in order for the laminate to stick to your substrate you've got to apply a lot of pressure this just makes it a lot easier to get nice even pressure over the surface of your laminate you need contact cement this is the glue that we're going to use to hold down the laminate to our substrate you're going to want a little paint tray a foam roller and it's helpful if you pick up a paint brush now you don't need a fancy one just get the cheapest like two dollar paint brush they have i'll show you why you're going to want this here in just a little bit the first step in applying laminate is picking out what sort of substrate you want for your worktop that you're actually going to glue the laminate to there's a couple different options you can either do plywood or you can do mdf you want to steer clear of anything like osb or chipboard anything that's got a texture to the surface because there's a chance that that texture is actually going to mess up your laminate top and it's going to show through so you want something perfectly smooth that's the most important thing is there a benefit to doing mdf over plywood oh the only thing i can think is maybe cost to get a nice smooth plywood it's probably going to be a little more expensive than mdf mdf is super stable it's not going to move around although plywood's pretty stable as well so you do you i usually go with mdf it seems a lot harder in my opinion it's not going to dent as easy but the laminate is going to protect it anyway so i'm just getting into the weeds here a little bit plywood or mdf they're both great options so i've already cut my piece for the bridge i'm going to do plywood for that one this is going to be the bridge between my dado saw and my table saw but next i need to cut out a piece of mdf to sit on top of that little cart that i made so we're going to cut that get it in place and start getting some laminate on here all right so i just cut the mdf that's going to go on the top and create that substrate to glue the laminate to now when you're cutting your top you just really have to decide how big of an overhang you want i'm gonna face this entire thing with three quarter inch hard maple that's going to give me a three quarter inch overhang so i cut this piece so it's perfectly the exact size of my top now if you're wanting an overhang to clamp things to or something like that just bring it out as far as you want keeping in mind that whatever thickness your substrate is you just need enough meat there that it's going to be nice and sturdy so i cut this the exact size so it should fit right on here pretty nice and flush now i'm going to pull this back off and talk about one more thing when you're building your piece you want to think through exactly how you're going to attach your top now i usually use pocket holes around the perimeter in this case i got these support pieces and they're going to work great to send some screws just right up through those and hold my top on the reason you want to think through how you're going to attach your top is you want to think down the road in the future if you ever need to replace your top you don't want to screw in from the top holding your top on and then cover those screws with laminate because then you're never getting that top off if you hook it from underneath either through these support pieces or pocket holes then if it comes time to replace your top all you have to do is unscrew the top the whole thing comes off you make a new top plop it on there and you're good to go without damaging your actual piece so just something to keep in your mind as you're constructing whatever piece you're applying laminate to [Music] all right now that we've got our mdf substrate attached to the top of our cabinet we are going to make a border of hard maple around the entire thing now you don't have to use hard maple you can really use any kind of wood you want just keep in mind the harder the wood the more protection it's going to give to your piece that's going to kind of act as the bumper and it's going to help protect that edge of the laminate from chipping i like using hard maple in the shop because it's flipping hard maple so it's hard but you do you cherry walnut ash poplar pine but the softer you go the less protection you're gonna get so we're gonna rip this down into strips i'm going to overhang this down past my mdf three quarters of an inch so my mdf's three quarters of an inch we're going to cut some inch and a half strips and we're just going to do a mitered frame around this entire thing so let's get these strips cut and let's get them hooked on here [Music] all right so i've got my maple strips cut down basically we're just going to attach these just like that making sure that the maple is flush with our mdf if you're having a hard time getting your maple flush at the mdf it's better to bring it up just a hair higher than the mdf rather than have it too low we can always sand that maple back down to meet the mdf so it's nice and perfect it's a lot harder to sand through that mdf with all the glue in there it's just nasty you don't want to do that now i know it's not rocket science cutting mitered pieces and wrapping them around a top like this but there are a few tricks that i have learned that will just make it a lot easier so i don't know if these are helpful or not but here we go first thing i like to do is always cut a scrap piece with a mitered edge on there that just allows me to get my piece on there and test to see if i have the fit exactly how i want it but when you're working by yourself and you only have so many hands that can still be tricky so sometimes what i'll do is i'll just take a dab of ca glue put it on there like that and i'll actually glue this piece to my corner all right so now that that's just glued on that'll pop right off if i just tap it against something too hard so be careful it's barely holding on there but i can use that piece to get that exactly where i want it and then all i got to do is take a clamp clamp it on here now i can double check make sure this is exactly where i want it so i know that that miter is going to be perfect then with this clamp down here it allows me to come over and get this marked dead nuts with this side it's just a lot easier knowing that that's perfect having to go back and forth when you're working by yourself if you got two people somebody can probably just hold it on that end make sure you're good but when you're working by yourself you got to get creative now that we know that that's marked right and this is good this pops right off no problem we'll take it over and we'll cut our other miter at a time now to hook this on we're just going to go really simple we're going to glue and tack it in place with a 16 gauge brad nailer if you're worried about nail holes showing you could just clamp and glue these on it's going to take a lot longer and i'm just going to fill these holes it's a work piece i don't really care about the nails but when you are attaching the piece you want to keep in mind eventually you might want to take that top off so don't glue it to the mdf and your box just glue it to the mdf same with the nails just tack into that mdf that way the top is only hooked to the base from those screws on the inside so you can pop that top off if you need to so i'm just going to put down a thin layer of glue at the top of my piece here and then we're gonna just slap it up there don't worry about it being too lined up right now take a clamp and put it on there to hold it in place and then once you got it held with a little resistance you can take your scrap piece and come back and fine tune how you want that thing to fit on there so that's pretty darn good on that side check your fit on this side that's pretty darn good on that side a little tap looks good all right now you want to make sure that your maple is either perfectly flush with the mdf or like i said just a hair above i like to go just a hair up just to be safe and then you're just going to work your way along and tack it right in to that mdf [Music] now when you get to your last piece that you got to put on you got a miter on this side you got a miter on this side the easiest way to do it is let's say you want your piece to be this side facing out you flip it around backwards you line it up right on your edge and then you just use the base of each miter to mark exactly where you need to make your cut then all you got to do is cut your miter making sure that you know that that is your shortest distance and your miter is going to go out long ways you cut on that line on that line and you should get a perfect fit let's see if it works [Music] perfect love it when that happens especially on camera [Music] all right now that we've got our mdf completely wrapped in this hard maple the next thing we need to do is sand down this top so that it is perfectly smooth you don't want the maple sticking up higher than the mdf or the mdf sticking up higher than the maple you want it completely level so you got a nice surface to glue our laminate to i also took the time to wrap this piece of plywood in hard maple this is going to be that little bridge between the dado saw and the tail table saw so we're going to get this all sanded down and then i promise you we're going to get to actually putting laminate on it [Music] this video was sponsored by skillshare skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of inspiring classes for creators explore new skills deepen existing passions and get lost in creativity one class that i recently took and thoroughly enjoyed was indoor gardening grow house plants veggies and herbs with ekta chaudhary i think the major impact that house plants have had on me is that when i was in my hostel i was finishing my phd research and towards the end of my research i was really looking for a hobby something that would give me some happiness 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anyways we sanded down the top of our cart we sanded down the top of our bridge we're ready to start cutting our laminate down to size and getting it on there so i ordered this laminate let's see if i can take this lid off while i'm talking to you yeah order this laminate online i will include a link in the video description to where you can order laminate online as well it just shows up in your door rolled up like this you can get it literally any color you can imagine color wood grain faux marble anything i just went with black because i'm boring so once you get it out you want to be careful unrolling it it is a very sturdy durable product but if you bend it too far it will break before it gets attached to the substrate so just be gentle with it all right so we're just going to lay it out here now you don't have to use a saw to cut this although i have seen people actually run this through the table saw that's fine the easiest thing to do is just to score it and break it using this little laminate laminate scorer thingamabob so all you're going to want to do is take a nice straight edge i'm just going to use the track off of one of my track saws all right so i already measured the top of our little roll card it's roughly 27 by 33 and a half that's giving us just about a quarter of an inch room on all four sides we'll clean that up before we trim it down so we want to cut it big for right now so first we're gonna move this out to 27 inches and you don't have to be perfect with this it can be off a little bit you just don't want it to be too small okay and if it's not perfectly square well that's okay too make sure that's close to 27. that's within 27. then we're going to take our straight edge hold it firm down and then you're going to take your laminate score and you're just going to drag this along the edge now you don't want this to wander into your piece that you're going to use it'll put a nice crisp scratch across the top which you don't want so make sure you stay tight against that edge and you're just going to run it back a few times you're not cutting all the way through the laminate okay that's not the goal here it's just to score the top and give us a weak point that we can then snap it to the right size i'll show you [Applause] all right now that we've got a nice scored line all you got to do is fold this over until it snaps now you can fold it up this way or you could fold it down the other way since it's already oriented like this i'm just going to go with it there you go it's always going to break right along your scored line and you shouldn't have any problems with tear out or chip out or anything like that so we're going to set that aside 27 by what did i say 33 and a half i think so now we're going to do that line now because i'm cutting this on top of this other laminate surface you just want to be careful where you start your score that you don't start out on your table or you're going to mar up your surface underneath so just start like a sixteenth of an inch back and stop like a sixteenth of an inch from this side [Applause] and then we just gotta break this one and there is the piece of laminate for the top of our roll cart so let's take it over there and make sure that it fits all right it looks pretty good we got just about a quarter to a half inch overhang on all four sides that's fine we want to be a little on the big side the last thing you want is for it to be too small even for it to be exact that's just going to make it hard once you get the glue down once it sticks sometimes it's hard to adjust and line it up so if you give yourself plenty of room we can trim it all down and make it perfect after we get it glued down so now that we have our laminate cut the next thing is applying the contact cement so i'm gonna go grab that and we're gonna get some goo on this thing and hopefully just done this thing not all over myself like last time well that's not going to work contact cement gives off some pretty nasty fumes so you definitely want to wear a respirator while you're applying it and since i have to be wearing a respirator well i'll just walk you through this in a traditional voice over so really it's simple you're just going to take your foam roller and you're going to apply contact cement to both your substrate and the bottom side of your laminate now sometimes the foam roller can leave little air bubbles as the poorest mdf filters air up through the top this is where that two dollar brush comes in handy if you use it to just tip out the contact cement as you go it will eliminate all those little air bubbles and you just keep working your way across the surface the main goal here is to just get a nice even coat over the entire thing you want to go slow and make sure you don't miss any spots any spots you miss is a spot that's not going to adhere after you get a coat on every single surface i let it dry until i can touch it without it getting all over my fingers then i do a second coat now sometimes you might even need to do a third coat what you're looking for is a nice sheen to the entire surface after it's dry all right we've now done two coats of contact cement on both our top surface here as well as the underside of our laminate so we're ready to stick these together now contact cement is unlike any other glue that you come across because with the normal glue you want it to stay viscous and you're trying to work within an open time and get things together before that glue dries up with contact cement you put it on you let it get completely dry before you stick your two sides together it's actually the chemical reaction of itself sticking to itself that makes it adhere when it comes in contact hence the name contact cement so because it's going to stick as soon as it touches the bottom of that laminate we got to do something to allow us to move the laminate around get it positioned before it sticks and that's where putting some spacers come in now you can use dowels some people use an extension cord run back across some people use aluminum rods it doesn't really matter what you use all you're trying to do is lift the laminate off of this surface and not stick until we're ready for it to stick the most important thing is whatever you use you just want them to be clean you don't want there to be little bits of wood or debris that's going to fall off your stickers and get caught in between your laminate and your substrate so just make sure you lightly sand them or go over them just make sure nothing is going to fall off of them before you stick them down you just need enough to raise that laminate up so that it doesn't come in contact with your substrate and we're ready to get this laminate on here all right so we're going to grab our laminate and we're going to just set it on top of those stickers now it's not going to stick until we pull those stickers out from underneath so you can kind of look at your laminate now remember we made this a little bit large you just want to make sure that it is overhanging a little bit on all four sides before you start sticking it down now you could start from one side and work your way to the end but if you do that there's a greater chance that your piece is going to get skewed and it might not be covering on one side so what i've always done and i think is a good approach is to start in the middle and work your way out so we're gonna pull out our first sticker right in the middle and then we're just gonna apply some pressure right in the middle and that contact cement should attach to itself just use your arm you need about 25 pounds of pressure to get the adhesion that we're looking for with that contact cement so we're just going to start using our hands and then we'll switch to the roller here in a second now i like to start in the middle work all the way out to one side and then come back and work to the other side so after we remove one sticker we pull out another one and we just keep working our way across now that we've got a little more surface stuck down we can grab our laminate roller and really start applying some pressure to the laminate you just want to be careful because we do have that little bit of an overhang you don't want to put a ton of pressure right on that overhang or you could break off that edge and it could chip back over your top so just be careful there [Applause] but basically you're gonna roll move down pull out another sticker stick it down until you've worked your way all the way to the edge and then just really go to town with the roller making sure you've gotten nice even pressure coverage over the entire top then once we've got one side done we start moving our way down to the other side until finally we've got all of our stickers out now just spend a little more time than you think you need making sure you got the entire surface rolled and a lot of even pressure all right now this bond will continue to strengthen over the next 24 hours so it's not at its strongest yet but it's plenty strong for us to start working get our edges all trimmed down and get this thing done [Music] now that we've got this thing stuck down it's not going anywhere a lot of people will just come in with a router with a flush trim bit or whatever and they'll trim down the laminate to size and call it good i don't love hitting a router on this thin laminate edge there's just too great of a chance that something's going to go wrong and it's going to chip out and rip back into your table top so before i go to the router i like to get the scorer again i put a straight edge right on the edge of my table i score it and i just snap that off that's just prevention of anything bad happening [Music] well our laminate is all trimmed pretty much to the exact size of our top at this point so there's one last final step that is going to take this from 0 to 60 and make it look so good what i do is you can use a chamfer bit or a round over bit it doesn't matter but i like to hit the entire edge just with a really light chamfer this is simultaneously going to flush trim that laminate perfectly and it's going to cut it back just a hair this is going to help protect that edge and keep it from chipping out and just make your top last a lot longer now normally when you're running a router you always want to run it in a certain direction but when i'm doing a chamfer cut or just a really light pass especially on something that has a higher risk of chip out i like to run the router in the opposite direction so that i'm actually pulling in the opposite direction that the blade is spinning this just helps reduce chip out and make sure that we're not going to have any last minute problems when we're so close to the finish line so i'm going to turn this thing on zip around this and we're done laying this laminate [Music] all right it's all trimmed down now if you've got any contact cement on the top surface of the laminate i just wipe it down with a little mineral spirits that dissolves that contact cement and cleans everything up and then we are ready to slide these things over and get them in place [Music] well that's how you add laminate surfaces the top of your workbench or really anything i got this nice pull out additional work surface here with some storage that can slide under the table saw i did my little connection bridge from my dado saw over to the table saw surface so everything is connected beautiful black laminate hopefully that was helpful hopefully you learned something i will give one more tip let's say you got laminate glued down and you just really have to get it off for some reason maybe you got to reposition maybe you just want to replace the laminate itself a heat gun will reactivate the contact cement and if you start at a corner and heat it up and just peel it as you go you should be able to peel the laminate completely off and replace it adjust it so hopefully that helps subscribe down below check that video description for links to all the products i use in this video and most importantly have a wonderful day

Channel: Bourbon Moth Woodworking

Views: 432,144

Keywords: How to Install Laminate on Your Worktop, complete guide to making a laminate work surface, how to, installing laminate countertops, laminate countertop installation, contact cement, how to install laminate countertops, cutting laminate countertop, counter top, do it yourself, sheet laminate, laminate countertop, how to laminate, laminate counters, how to install laminate, best work surface, best workbench top, best workbench design, best workbench, best top for workbench, diy

Id: hUvTY6bFhSE

Length: 31min 23sec (1883 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 12 2021