Repairing the failed lamination

Over the last few sessions I’ve been flattening and untwisting my first two apron pieces, but I decided it was about time I did something about the partially failed lamination in the benchtop. I noticed that the gap between the planks was accumulating dust and shavings, and figured that this would probably force the gap to continue to widen. It seemed like the longer I ignored this problem, the harder it was going to be to recover from.

benchtop failed lamination — Close-up of the failed lamination

First I cleared out the gap of debris with a putty knife, then ran glue along the edge of the gap, and forced the glue down into the gap with the putty knife. Once I thought I had enough glue in there, I stood the benchtop up on edge and clamped it.

benchtop lamination repair — Lamination repair attempt

The gap seemed to close up fairly well, and I found it encouraging that glue was visibly squeezed out all along the line when I tightened down on the clamps. Tomorrow I’ll find out whether this has actually worked.

Lessons learned

Probably should have tried to fix this immediately, rather than leaving it for a couple of weeks.