hey Jordyn Christo here would fix my cabinet calm in this video I'm going to show you how to bend Formica plastic laminate around the radius edge on a countertop we're going to talk about some various things you need to know about how to do this success okay here's our Formica countertop radius it looks like it's about a three inch way now a three inch radius is the accepted minimum size where you can bend a piece of standard thickness laminate around it without it cracking anything smaller than that you may have to go to a piece of Viti plastic laminate or you can still use a standard thickness laminate and what you can do is you can take your laminate and clamp it to a scrap board and wherever it's going to be bending around that radius edge you can sand your laminate down with a belt sander to make it thinner and that will Bend that radius a lot easier if your radius is tighter than three inches you can use a heat gun you're just going to have to be very careful make sure that the laminate isn't cracking you might have to do practice piece now the way that you determine a three-inch radius if this was the board previously you would measure back from this corner three inches in this corner three inches and then back here three inches and three inches and then take a compass and put the point there and then you would draw your three inch radius on your wood now the way that I drew this three inch radius was I actually found a container that had a three inch radius on it and I just drew that radio that's really important when you cut a radius for a countertop or you make a radius for anything that you're going to wrap Formica on that the surface where the radius is going to be wrapped with the laminate has to be perfectly squared once you make your cut you can just take a square rest it on top of your countertop and run it all the way around that radius to make sure that it's perfectly square and if you need to make alterations to it you can do it with a block sander or a belt sander and I've got glue now on the countertop and on my practice edge for the demonstration now that countertop edge is an inch and a half you want your laminate edge to be two inches that will give you enough room for error in case your laminate gets off a little bit when you're bending the radius that will still cover the edge of the countertop completely now you just want to start on your straightedge first attach the laminate on there and you want to take your J roller and roll that down nice and tight bring your other hand around here and grab a hold of the radius and you're going to just pull on that laminate and keep pulling it down on top of the radius a little bit at a time as you roll it down tight with your J roller this is not a step that you want to be in a hurry on you want to take your time to make sure that the laminate is pressed really tight to the countertop edge because you don't want any void in there at all because it will cause it to crack at a later date you want it to be nice and flat that's why we wanted to make sure that it was 90 degrees and then you just run your J roller around it a few times okay once you get your laminate rolled down tight if for some reason you ended up with a void area right on the radius where the Formica meets the countertop what you would do is just get some automotive bondo filler and fill in that void area let it dry really good and then route your laminate off and sand it down good hey thanks for watching visit fix my cabinet com subscribe to our youtube channel I'm Jordy Cristo have a great day you