Formica Fascia Failure

I’ve spent the last few weeks prepping to put Formica atop my fascia. I was hoping for a truly professional look. In preparation. I mounted a 1/8″ hardboard fascia as backing. I reinforced the top and bottom edges of the hardboard by laminating additional strips of 1/8″ hardboard to the backs of the original hardboard. These reinforcing strips would also act as a guide for the bearing on a router flush trim bit. I bought a 30″ x 144″ sheet of black Formica and glued it to the fascia backing with contact cement. I trimmed the Formica with a Harbor Freight trim router with a Skil flush trim bit. Everything went good up until the trimming. What a disaster. I totally botched the trim job and it was super messy.

I attribute the botched trimming to a few reasons.

1. I didn’t have a suitable guide for the router bit bearing. Maybe I should have installed a half inch of reinforcing strips, the problem I was running into is I couldn’t always get them to match up.
2. The Harbor Freight router. The bit slipped from the collet twice. The face slipped numerous times.
3. The Skil flush trim bit has an 1/8″ gap between the bearing and the blade. And naturally the 1/8″ hardboard fell into this gap several times, causing chip outs.

Now what to do. I don’t think I’ll ever be happy if I don’t fix the problem, so my options are:

1. File out the small imperfections as best I can and cover the major ones with a smaller “trim” strip of Formica.
2. Remove the fascia and do it over again. With or without Formica.

I’m leaning toward just ripping this out and going with a hardboard fascia.

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