Plastic Table Finish
Has anyone replaced the shrink-wrapped plastic finish on a dinette table? Ours is only 4 years old, but it's starting to peel off from the bottom edge. Any helpful suggestions would be appreciated!
Forum Discussion
tommymick wrote:
I guess "vacuum-formed" is a better term. It's a particle-board table, with a plastic covering, similar to (but NOT) Formica. It wraps smoothly around the round corners and bull-nose edge, which is why I think it was vacuum-shrunk on there.
That sounds like standard, run-of-the-mill laminate. It might be built at the factory using a vacuum press system to hold the laminate while it's glued on, but I don't think that's a necessity. Often laminate is applied using a contact adhesive, at least when done onesey-twosey.
Maybe e.g. Gorilla Glue could reattach the laminate to the substrate, assuming the latter is still sound (and hasn't decomposed due to getting wet or something similar). Failing that, a moderate amount of woodworking ought to suffice to build a solid wood edging that replaces the factory wrap-around edging, and if everything is built carefully and assembled carefully (and the existing top trimmed to size carefully) could look pretty nice.
Building a table top is not inherently a particularly complicated task, though it can be a bit irksome to get everything square and level and matched up, depending on what materials one uses. Cutting one out of plywood and applying iron-on edging or something similar would probably be about the simplest and least tricky approach. (Maybe a pre-assembled built up panel from a big box store, with several narrow boards glued together, would be a bit simpler still; just cut and apply an appropriate finish.)
