One of the leftover tasks from a bathroom remodel is to put a countertop on one of the small storage cabinets:

We originally were going to have somebody fab a piece for us, but it’s a small job and they never really got back to us. So, it sat like this for a *long* time, but now it’s time to get moving on it.

After considering marble, we settled on doing solid surface because I can fabricate it with the tools that I already own. A little research took us to solidsurface.com, where we found a nice leftover piece of countertop in a color known as “Oregano Sand”, which we hope will go well with the overall color palette. That won out over white because we already have a white toilet and sink. A 20” x 43” x 0.5” piece was $116.33, and since I’m going to do a built-up edge – so it’s a full 1” thick on the visible part – I also picked up a tube of adhesive that is mostly color matched to the color of the material.

The fabrication approach I had planned was pretty simple:

1. Carefully measure the size of the base and add 5/8” on the sides and front.
2. Cut the solid surface piece on the table saw to the exact dimensions needed
3. Round the left and right corners.
4. Notch the left-back part to fit around the door trim
5. Glue on other pieces underneath the top with them sticking out a bit.
6. Trim the new pieces with a router and a bearing string-cutting bit so everything matches
7. Round over the top edge with a rounding over bit.

The downside of this is that I’ll need to be doing some cutting on the table saw, and that’s not my most accurate tool, and I’ll likely need to do some sanding to clean things up.

I was also going to say that notching out the corner for the trim would be a big pain, but I just now realized that the cabinet is only held in place by two screws into a stud, and it would be absolutely trivial to slide the thing over to the right by 5/16” and eliminate the notch.

But anyway, I don’t like doing the big things on the table saw.

And then I realized that I could easily just do a CAD design for the countertop and cut it out on my shaper origin. That will give me very good tolerances and there’s no reason to expect that it won’t require less rework than the table saw, and there’s much less chance I’ll slip and do something bad.

So, I went of and did some Fusioning, and came up with the following:

A simple base that is the side of the cabinet, and then a counter on top with nice 1/4” rounded corners on the front and a little notch at the back. I’ll be getting rid of the notch since I decided to just move the cabinet over slightly.

I’m currently missing the pieces that will be between the countertop and the cabinet to make the edge thicker. I’m going to model them on top of the countertop as that will be simpler to do. It ends up looking like this:

Note that there are three built-up pieces, each 3” x 19.25”. That allows them to overhang the front by 1/8” and overhang the sides by 3/16”.

Fabrication

I decided to use the shaper origin to do the fabrication:

That solid surface stuff is *hard*, it’s a bit like working in hardwood. I ended up only cutting 3mm at a time.

In retrospect, the shaper wasn’t the best choice for this; the size was fine but the edges weren’t as smooth as I had hoped. But they were close enough.