Burn marks on the kitchen bench

I received an email about a problem with an electric iron size burn on the surface of a Formica covered work bench. The person was quite distressed in that the surface was old (around about the 1980s) but she did not want to go to the expense of completely recovering all the working areas of the kitchen.

Surprisingly this is not an uncommon problem because, like my caller, many people believe that plastic laminated surfaces like Formica will withstand very high temperatures. Although laminates are resistant to normal household wear they can be damaged by extreme heat for example by leaving an electric iron on the surface for a few minutes.

My first questions were to establish where about on the surface the mark was situated. The reason for this was that I had a similar problem some years ago and I fixed my problem by cutting a piece of timber into the size of a dinner plate. I then covered this disc with an off cut of laminate that provided an interesting contrast to the worktop surface, trimmed around the edges to give a neat appearance and then fitted a piece of 20mm dowel to the centre of the underside of the disc. Into the centre of the burn mark I then drilled a 20mm hole; I then found a steel washer from my scrap box, fitted this over the dowel and then fitted the whole thing into the hole that I had drilled. The result a very neat fruit bowl platter that would swivel around so that one could get a nice piece of fruit from any side of the bowl! Plus of course it covered up a bad mistake.

Now back to the burn mark problem, it was very close to the cooker, in fact within arms reach, an ideal spot to place a hot pan if required. So my advice was to purchase a nice ceramic tile, one that really took her fancy. Then place the tile on top of the area where the burn mark was then make a pencil mark all around the sides, making sure of course that the tile was square with the edges.

Now there are a couple of choices. In one case she could score around the pencil marks and diagonally into the centre. Then use a chisel or similar and lift each segment up until the piece snapped off so that the tile fits neatly into the hole that’s left. Or she could simply clean off the surface over and around the damaged area and fix the tile on to the work bench.  Either way a small amount of contact adhesive would be required to glue the tile down. The result, a very handy surface to place hot cooking pans on and best of all it would look as though she planned to have it there all along.

Read more from Chris Bennett.