Creating a seamless finish with Laseredge™ consists of ‘seeing what everyone else has seen, but thinking what no-one else has thought’ (Albert Szent-Gyorgyi) – it’s not as easy as it looks!
Many cabinetmakers understand the struggle to achieve a seamless edge on high gloss panels. Sage Doors invested in the world-industry-leading brand of edgebanders, Homag, to achieve this. A lot of on-going research and development goes into improving the finished product of Acrygloss® and Laseredge™. Modifications and adjustments are regularly made to the edgebander to improve the finished quality. By having their own onsite technician, Sage Doors can fine tune their edgebander whenever required to keep the quality of the edge consistent.
Most edgebanders are set up with 2mm radius tooling (corner rounding). However, using 2mm tooling on 1 or 1.2mm edgetape creates an uneven radius that is almost sharp on one side. The expense spent on the HotAir technology is wasted with sub-standard machining on the finished product/edge.
Sage Doors realized that they would achieve a better finish if their edge bander was set up exclusively for 1.2mm laser edge tape; therefore, all aggregates in their machine are fitted with special 1.2mm radius tooling.
With edgetape dimensions varying between brands, Sage Doors chose to use just one brand of edgetape to get a consistent, quality finish. After trying many different brands of edging, Sage Doors found that MKT laser edgetape was the best quality in the market, and spec’d out their machine specifically for it.
A bad corner rounding unit can make even the highest quality edge tapes look ugly – creating a seamless edge isn’t as simple as it looks.
Why is MKT laser edgetape so much better than other laser edgetape?
The incredibly hard functional layer (the back side of laser edgetape that contains polymers to help it melt faster) on MTK’s Alpha Tape Zero PP helps create a seamless edge. A soft functional layer catches dirt and looks like a glue joint over time, defeating the purpose of using laser edge technology.
Rule of Thumb! To test the hardness of the functional layer, check whether you can mark the functional layer with your thumbnail. You should not be able to make any visible mark at all on the back of the functional layer.
Unlike other laser edgebandings, MKT Alpha-Tape Zero can fully weld to itself at the joint in the corners.
MKT has many different finish options for their edgebanding. One of them, their Excellent Gloss ™ edgetape has a very high gloss level; you can barely see the difference between Acrygloss® board and the edge banding. Most high gloss edgetapes are dull compared to the board they are applied to.
Polypropylene shrinks less than PVC or ABS, making it ideal for laser edgebanding where extreme heat is involved.
Sage Doors realized they would need to use MTK’s Alpha Tape Zero PP laser edgetape to be able to produce a product to the standard that they wanted to achieve.