Corian Worktops

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4 Jan 2006
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Location
Blackpool
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United Kingdom
We are due to have some Corian tops in our kitchen by Dupont and we have asked our kitchen shop if we can have a patern put in the front edge.
Does anyone know the name of the patern inlay and who supplies it.The patern looks very stuning and looks like small squares of another colour.
 
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The Corian fabricator your kitchen shop uses will make-up these patterns from solid and inlay them. Corian is basically all bonded together with a special adhesive and than polished to finish, in much the same way as stone is. I work with a similar material called Iro by Irpen and the piano key is made by bonding parallel strips of different colours together then cross cutting to get the grey/white banding. Do enough and you can add the resulting bands to the edge to get the effect you pointed us towards. I've done colour spots and even company logos in the past - aything is possible if you have the right gear.

Scrit
 
Thanks Scrit
Do you have any Corian contacts who have made the inlay as I spoke to www.pianokeyinlay.co.uk yesterday and they said they hold the patent for the design in any materials and it is only available through them. May be worth getting another est if its available.
 
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Scrit, the piano key material in the link above is machine cut (probably CNC) it saves a lot of time and therefore cost on the part of the fabricator. But if it's a non standard colour or size square you want then as you say the fabricator will make it up. Just like buying banding & stringing for veneer work really.

I would rather go with granite in a kitchen as the corian marks too easily, not so bad in a bathroom and there is not much cost difference.

Jason
 
Hit_It

I know how this stuff is fabricated and with the greatest respect to the guys in Blackpool I can't see how you can patent a bi-colour edge stringing. After all, woodworkers have been using them for hundreds of years. The fact that they've developed a process to produce the stringings may be patentable - but only if they can prove to the Patent Office that it is a unique or unusual combination of technologies. My feeling is that any competent solid surface fabricator should be able to produce a banding such as this. I'm not trying to down play the skill of your fabricator - that is self-evident - but there is a huge amount of over-inflated hype in the solid surface market.

If you want alternative fabricators you could try ringing Dupont (manufacturers of Corian) for a list of authorised fabricators, or try Formica for a list of their Colourcore fabricators. There are other manufacturers of similar materials including Schock at Bamber Bridge (their parent company in Germany developed Corian for Dupont) and Wilsonart up in Co. Durham. You could also take a look at Iro on the Irpen site - they don't sell into the domestic market in the UK, but their colour range is just as wide as Corian.

Jason

The inlay shown probably doesn't need a CNC to cut it, just an accurate panel saw. A lot of solid surface materials such as Corian, Schock, Formica Colourcore, etc. are basically acrylic resins bonded onto a wood product substrate, such as chipboard or MDF. The materials are also supplied in thin sheets down to 3mm thick in many cases and the nice thing about acrylic is that you can glue it together using a solvent cement which is not dissimilar to the stuff used for Airfix kits! That means that you can make-up chess boards in the stuff then apply them to a routed-out section in a worktop if you like (something they teach fabricators to do, BTW). The downside is that it is impossible to get a high gloss finish on it (if that is what you want) and it does have a tendency to mark if abused. Similarly burn it and you can rout-out a section and repair it almost invisibly by inlaying. A CNC is nice to have, but not strictly necessary on solid surface materials as most of them (including Corian) can be worked with conventional woodworking tools and tooling - the only difference is that hand router tooling require Delrin bearing covers to avoid marking the material. One or two manufacturers such as Dupont and Formica put major restrictions on who they will sell the raw material to - that's the only special thing about the stuff. In commercial kitchens or bathrooms there is a good case for solid surface products on the ground of easy maintainability, but personally I'm with you on the granite worktops for domestic surfaces.

Scrit
 
The guys in Blackpool tell me its the overall tonal contrast which has the patent on it .Thats why other fabricators can not produce it in any size or colour from any solid surface material. Just checked with patent office and they state no one else is allowed to manufacture the strip. What a headache looks like they have the job stitched up but I must admit they are the cheapest of three prices today. The reason we are after Corian is to upgrade our existing kitchen .We already have Corian which has proved ace but it is 20 years old and we fancied a different colour.We did consider granite but, in our apartment we have granite , which has a lemon stain , glass rings from red wine. Our neighbour also has granite with a large scorch mark and it is scratched . The granite firm say they can polish the scratches out but can not get rid of the stains or sort out scorch marks. He said it would have been better sealed from the start. As we explained to him it was . So it cost him a sale.
 
Hit It
The only problem that I can see with using the keys is that you would also have to get the sheet corian from the same source as each sheet of corian has a consecutive batch number and you should avoid using sheets with too big a gap in the numbers as there is slight variation in the shade from one sheet to the next.

Can't see how the colour contrast can be patented as anyone could specify the same too colours and there are only a hundread or so to choose from, someone else can calculate the number of permutations.

Scrit
Agree that if you can work wood then there is not much to corian, just router, circ/table saw and jigsaw are all you need, not forgetting the usual Festool sander. I usually get the kitchens templated and fitted by my fabricator but temp & fit the bathrooms, and I get to play with the off-cuts
z18.jpg

z22.jpg

Jason
 
Jasonb said:
Scrit, the piano key material in the link above is machine cut (probably CNC) it saves a lot of time and therefore cost on the part of the fabricator. But if it's a non standard colour or size square you want then as you say the fabricator will make it up. Just like buying banding & stringing for veneer work really.

I would rather go with granite in a kitchen as the corian marks too easily, not so bad in a bathroom and there is not much cost difference.

Jason

granite is probably cheaper.
 
We have now gone with the corian at Worktop Creations Ltd as they worked out cheeper than two granite prices that we previously had . Also proof is in in the previous quote Granite is an alternative but not as good.
Worktop Creations did us a good deal and they explained that due to the demand and the bigest sales in the UK on record ,prices have now come down to such an extent that they often undercut granite. :LOL: :LOL: :LOL:
 

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