Edging for melamine coated chipboard

[pinnerite]

It is many years since I built furniture (Contiboard). The edging in this days was pretty poor.

I have no experience of what's on offer these days. I really would like advice on what to avoid.

TIA

[GB]

It's quite fashionable to build out of plywood, and make a feature of the plies.

[newshound]

That's mostly what I do these days.

I have a chipboard worktop with an exposed edge, I've just got a timber batten fitted on that (glued with concealed dowels, then varnished). I have an aluminium edging on the top of an MDF door in front of the sink to protect it from drips and splashes.

[John Rumm]

IME the best options with chipboard are either commercial edge banding - typically iron on, or make your own wooden lipping.

I normally go for a wood lipping - make sure to cut the board edges cleanly, and then glue on a wood strip that is a little wider than the board. Once the glue is dry, either plane or use a flush trim router bit to bring the sides down to the same thickness as the board. You can then sand or route whatever profile you want on the front of the board.

E.g. covering the cut edge of the MDF on the leading edges of the sides of the cabinet here:

Or you can use a lipping to add extra thickness in some cases, like on this desk edge:

The desk is only 18mm MDF, but the lipping is 40mm deep - stimmed flush on the top, and then rounded over on the edges. It was also deep enough to allow the radius to be cut onto the corners.

[Tim Lamb]

Oh! I've usually attached a matching strip of hardwood and made a

*feature* of that:-)

Modern faced MDF is much better/expensive than days of yore.

[Andrew]

Do you have a spirit level fetish ? :-)

Reminds me of Monty Don's potting shed with his impressive collection of trowels.

[Andrew]

what is the technical name for those extending ?roller draw runners ?. They look a bit overkill for just a drawer. Sort of thing you would use for a server rack that needs pulling out.

[pinnerite]

Thank you.

[John Rumm]

Possibly, but not enough to make drawers for them!

But I do have lots of CDs:

Each drawer will take 120 or so.

Thanks! :-)

[John Rumm]

"Full extension" drawer runners or drawer slides. They have a floating middle section that allows all of the drawer to clear the cabinet (or would do had not not made them extra deep for a bit more capacity)

They are a little bit more pricey than the normal ones, but I bought a bulk lot of 16 pairs for IIRC something like £90 on eBay...

Indeed, however 120 CDs are surprisingly heavy.

And if all stacked spine up, you want to be able to read what is on the edges of the ones at the back of the drawer.

In context:

[alan_m]

But rip them to MP3 or some other format and the storage can be the size of a matchbox. :)

[Andrew]

But if you want to preserve CD quality you still end up with big files, especially if you use a better format than MP3, plus all the time needed to do the ripping and archiving.

[John Rumm]

I have probably 650 of them ripped to .flac files and stored on the network.

However that does not make the physical discs vanish![1]

(and my trusty Rotel RCD 965BX CD players still has the edge in audio quality when compared to any of my other playback devices)

[1] and I would not want to lose the physical CDs anyway since they are not only a backup, but also have sleeve notes that you don't preserve on ripping.

[John Rumm]

Yup I rip everything to lossless flac files. So 10MB to 45MB per track typically. I have about 100GB currently in my music folder.

The ripping is actually fairly painless. I use Exact Audio Copy[1], and have a couple of drives[2] in one machine that were carefully selected because of their very good CD audio extraction. They will normally rip at 24x speed. So can rip a whole CD in under 5 mins.

I run two copies at once, that way can swap discs into both drives, which brings the effective ripping time down further. Normally EAC can also lookup all the track titles and cover art for the disc automatically.

[1] [2] Optiarc DVD-RW AS-7240S Not all drives are created equal alas - so some like my Samsung bluray drive which is excellent for handling video formats, its pretty slow on audio ripping.

[fred]

Sorry that?s so last year

[The Natural Philosopher]

These days you 3d print it in click together sections