A few moments of carelessness can cost quite a bit.

[Crazyraceguy]

The regular delivery driver has been off all week, so one of the project managers made a run to deliver a job that I built a few months ago. It has been sitting, since the site was not ready for it.
Apparently the thing made it all the way to the site, yet somehow it got chipped on the exposed seam, during the unload process. Since it is the joining seam of a 2 part unit, they had to bring both halves back, for the repair. That is where the real malfunction came in. It wasn't tied down well enough.
This caused it to bash into the front wall of the box truck. Much more damage resulted. The part that was un-damaged, going back into the truck, got it that time. The original damage could have been peeled and replaced fairly easily, with only one piece of laminate (less than 1/2 a sheet)
Smashing the corner, of the finished end, however, turned this into a 10+ hour situation and required an entire 5 x 12 and a 4 x 8 sheet. It went from a simple R&R of 1 piece, to 7 and a lot more material.
This took over 10 hours to fix something that I only spent less than 15 hours to build, in the first place.
I was off on Monday, when this happened, and it was the first thing I saw coming in the door Tuesday morning. Rather disappointing  [unsure]
I had another emergency to deal with first, didn't start it until yesterday, finished before noon today.

 

[tjbnwi]

We tried a moving company to deliver our cabinets. They snapped a 14’ long based cabinet in half trying to move it from the truck to the home. I was in back home taking care of some stuff for my move, Zach had previous plans so he was not going to be around.

This happened on a Friday, they need to cabinet on Monday. I flew back to Colorado Springs Saturday morning, Zach and some help delivered the new cabinet Monday afternoon while I was flying back home. Bright part was all the doors, drawers faces and hardware were reusable with limited touch up.

Yes, that weekend really sucked. Gotta love when others make things go sideways.

Tom

 

[Crazyraceguy]

That's one of my top pet peeves, damage to finished products is simply unacceptable.

 

[TinyShop]

I totally feel your pain.

 

[DeejayK]

No excuse to treat someone else’s work like this, might have been different if they had invested the effort and skill into the project! How did you strip the laminate and clean up the surface, ready for reapplication? Thanks

 

[Crazyraceguy]

No excuse to treat someone else’s work like this, might have been different if they had invested the effort and skill into the project! How did you strip the laminate and clean up the surface, ready for reapplication? Thanks

That's the biggest problem. My mantra has always been "You broke it, you fix it"......"there-in lies the rub" as they say. The people who do this kind of careless damage, have absolutely no ability to actually do the repair. Often the repair takes more skill/experience than the original assembly. Sometimes, this is even "built in" to the project, in the form of the way the layers work with each other. You can't always do that though.

The stripping is kind of dependent on time. The procedure is the same either way, but the results are different.
On a job that has been done for a very short time (up to a week or so) it goes quickly. All it takes is some lacquer thinner and a razor knife. You just pick at an edge and squirt some thinner into it. The piece will begin to pull up, exposing more surface. Squirt some more and keep rolling it back. It helps a lot (and uses less thinner) If you can do this in a vertical orientation. As you peel it downward, the thinner just rolls with it. The contact cement sort of melts and separates.
It can be done on horizontal surfaces, it just takes more effort to keep the thinner running toward the meeting point.
The curve is thehard part. There are two reasons for that. First is the direction of pull, when you peel it.
You absolutely "have to" pull in the direction of the curve. Laminate will bend in any direction, but only one. It will not cover a "dome", like something stretchy can.
This makes keeping the thinner in the right place hard, it just runs through and onto the floor.
Fortunately, this one was small enough that I could stand it on end and peel the right direction, but it's not quite that easy. This was done with kerfed ply, with the kerfs facing out. So, even with the piece standing the right way for the thinner to flow, it gets interrupted at every kerf. It's much easier to peel a smooth surface.
As I said before, time plays a part in this. The longer it sits, the more difficult it is to get it to release. The glue does not dissolve quite as readily. It will, just takes more time and a little more pressure/pulling.
This has been sitting, in a hot shop, since April.

The damage to the sub-structure was not that bad. The wood itself will flex a little and spring back, laminate will not. It only needed a little body filler and some aggressive sanding to fix that part.