Fixing oak flooring to a work top.

What about hot glue?

I'd be more inclined to consider impact adhesive after giving the formica a good roughening. And perhaps screwing from the back rather than secret nailing, for extra strength.

I'd rough up the laminate and use low expansion "plasterboard foam" then place lots of heavy objects all over the surface (oh and a light misting of water on the surfaces prior to foam to help cure)

Super strong, quick to cure, sticks anything to anything, and if you put enough weight on to prevent any vertical expansion it adds virtually no glue height.

Terrible idea. Car body filler.

Hot glue - or hot melt from a gun? Not really used traditional hot glue.

Due to the design of the home made unit, access to all of the underside of the worktop isn't easy. If it were, I'd simply take it off and turn it over to get to the plain wood faced blockboard. As ordinary wood glue worked fine with the other one.

Not answering the question, but ... are you sure you want an oak worktop? Ours is well oiled but so easily gets blackened by tins that are left on it that I'll be replacing it with a different hardwood when I get round to that part of the project.

I'd use impact adhesive. After all that is what the formica was originally fixed with

Hot from a gun I was thinking. But as my range of adhesives are mainly just this and "No More Nails", I might not be the best adviser.

It's in a bog. ;-) The one I have in the bathroom has survived extremely well. Must be 15 years old plus now and never re-finished. But I do mop any water off it as needed.

I'm not sure about car body filler and I'm unlikely to experiment as I don't have a car. But I think you might be a bit a bit biased regarding hot melt glue. It's wonderfully versatile stuff. I'm even sticking wallpaper on with it today.

I'm not sure it would stay molten for long enough to position the T&G correctly.

Friends rented a property with an oiled wooden counter top and yes they ended up with black rings from leaving cans that had just been washed out for recycling on it overnight.

This stuff isn't oiled. Has some form of varnish coating. Which has lasted very well indeed. Of course I've no idea how it would perform in a kitchen with hot etc things placed on it. That doesn't happen in a bathroom.

I had to replace large sections with the same problem, and rot. You MUST not consider oak to be a durable worksurface. Use trays or boards to protect it.

If you catch it early black rings can be bleached or sanded out and the surface re-oiled.

Or wallpaper :-)

As an aside, TNP is a big fan of hot melt glue: but on the right jobs. I will concede that one might be able to repair heavily painted anaglypta in an internal corner with hot melt. In the old days I sometimes used it to "tack weld" phone cable around awkward obstacles.

Very perceptive sir. Have you hacked my webcam?

That' a job I've got planned, once I've made the fimo ivy leaves, so the cable can meander down the bedroom wall in a curvaceous manner.

That's the kiss of death for it here, then. ;-)

Main thing I use it for is to protect a PCB etc after a repair to a track

- or where you have to add a 'birds nest'.

Only surface mount cabling here is the pyro in the conservatory. ;-)

Just for the record, I make stuff. I LOVE making stuff. Especially model aircraft. And houses. Or bits thereof.

I have used and currently won just about every glue that ever exzisted.

Hide Glue. Hot glue Aerolite 306 Cascamite White PVA Aliphatic PVA Starch based wall paper pastes. Foaming polyurethane. Balsa cement Polystyrene cement PVC cement Cyanoacrylate 'super glues' Epoxy filled and unfilled Polyester resin and its filled style - car body filler. Soft solder Aluminium solder Contact adhesive (spirit based, i.e original evostik) Contact adhesive (water based, i.e later evostik) Polyurethane glues like UHU. Latex glues like Copydex.

Of these by far the most ubiquitous for porous surfaces is good old white PVA.

For non porous surfaces car body filler sticks to more things than any other glue. It is also a superb gap filler. You can fill a ripped out chunk of chipboard cupboard with it and make hinge points stronger than the original chip. Same for rotted wood sections if they are to be painted. You can also use it to glue mortar back together, or indeed remake render.

I do use hot glue, but only where a non permanent or low strength join is required. I used to use epoxy to glue servos and so on in my models, but its a pain to remove when the model is recycled. Hot glue can be peeled off. Hot glue is the glue of choice for polystyrene foam as well

- everything else attacks it.

In general I use epoxy as a glue less than I use body filler. It has to be mixed exactly and surfaces roughed up and degreased and the end product stoved or heated with a hot air gun, or it stays soft. But nothing beats it for china repair after baking at 100C or so.

Balsa PVC and polystyrene cements are really very narrow and specific in application.

Contact adhesive I reserve for the job than nothing else will touch, Polythene for example.

Latex adhesive is the best way to hold fabric to wood, to make cases covered in fabric.

Solder will connect nearly all metal stuff together, except chrome. Even aluminium with the right evil choking Carr's flux (open the windows). I don't have kit to weld or braze though.

The problem with hot glue over a wide area is that it cools off before you have fished applying it. Possibly you could run an iron over it afterwards, but unless you have an industrial heated press, I wouldn't use it to laminate.

Car body filler is gap filling and has a longer shuffle time (if you use less catalyst) and sets in the absence of air, so as long as you can push the laminate down evenly for half an hour or so, it will work