TIL a cabinet shop in Portland has been using plywood with melamine faces since 2018 and nobody talks about how it dulls blades twice as fast

I stopped by Willamette Woodworks last Thursday and the lead guy told me they went through 3 sets of router bits in 6 months because the melamine coating eats carbide for breakfast, has anyone else run into this issue with prefinished panels?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_mila27d ago

yeah man that melamine is no joke, I had the same problem a couple years back when I grabbed a batch of prefinished panels from a local supplier for some closet shelving. what finally worked for me was switching to a diamond grit blade for the initial cuts and then using a brand new carbide tipped blade just for the edge banding and dados. saved my router bits like crazy, still had to replace them more often than with plain ply but it stretched it out to maybe once a year instead of every two months. also I started keeping a spray bottle of water nearby to cool things down mid cut, seems to help a bit with the heat buildup that kills the edges.

the_lucas26d ago

Huh, I always thought water on cuts was crazy, but you might be onto something.