Gluing Countertop Material for Turning

Here's a really unusual bowl turning material that I really like working with. This is solid surface countertop, and you can get this stuff as scraps from anybody who fabricates countertops. Really looks nice when it's done, it looks like you turned a chunk of stone, I think that's pretty cool. One of the problems with this is that solid surface countertop material comes in 1/2 inch thicknesses and we want way more than that in order to make up a bowl like this one. So what I wanna talk about is how you can properly glue this stuff together to make sure it's gonna stay stuck and it's gonna come out as seamless as that finished bowl I have right there.

The key to this is just making sure you use the right glue. We're gonna use CA glue, CA stands for cyanoacrylate. Comes in a lot of different viscosities. For this particular operation, I wanna use the medium thickness, medium viscosity. One of the things I've done to get ready for this is I took my solid surface pieces and I sanded them just a little bit.

Countertop material is really smooth, which is great for a countertop, not so good for adhesion. So we wanna give this a little bit of tooth, we wanna make sure it can stick together. So I've already taken care of that, now CA glue dries pretty fast. So once we get moving, we wanna make sure we can keep moving, so I'm just checking here to make sure I've got all my stuff. And I'm gonna brush that glue out, too much is better than too little.

Moving fast so that it doesn't start to bond before I'm ready. And you can use accelerators with CA glue, this would be a bad time to do so because what we wanna do is get this stuff put together and have time to get clamps on it, get the parts aligned, make sure that everything is hunky dory before the glue starts to grab. You can see how the parts are sliding here that there's still some open time on the glue. Okay, just a little bit of pressure on that first clamp, just enough to help hold them so I can do more alignment. And you're probably really starting to see the importance of having these latex gloves on.

Little more pressure on that one. Now we can get rid of our stand. All right, now to get complete adhesion on this, I wanna let this thing set for a few hours. We've got a lot of glue way inside there and we wanna make sure it cures all the way to the center. I've got a blank here that I started working on previously, I glued this up yesterday, and what I've done here is started to get ready to get this on the lathe.

So I cut this on a miter saw in order to produce an octagon. Look right there where I made that cut, you can really see how seamless that is from using the CA glue to bond these layers together, leading us up to a point where we can complete a bowl like that. It's a really cool material to work with, it looks great when you get it seamless like that. And the key to that is making sure you use the right glue to hold the layers together.