Thread: Best method for joining two pieces of Melamine?

Are you going to sit the bookshelves on top of this? If so I'd be concerned about weight - assuming your talking melamine covered particle board, there's not a whole lot of weight bearing capability in that material.

Or, are you planning on making bookshelves from this material and then join them together?

Or, are you looking to make the pictured joinery, and attach that to the top of existing bookshelves to brace them together?

If either of the last two are true, then I would actually consider making this from a single piece of material - i.e. cut the required size from a single sheet. Thus, no joinery is required, and the piece is as strong as it can be.

Just bear in mind this isn't the strongest material out there, and be mindful of the stresses you might be asking it to handle.

Yeah definitely won't have anything heavy on it. Mainly just figurines and some blu-rays - nothing heavy at all.

So the corner has a bookshelf on either side, about 50-60cm from the corner (if that makes sense), so my hope would be to have the L-shaped shelf link them both. I was thinking of adding brackets too for extra support.

Originally Posted by Midnight Man

If either of the last two are true, then I would actually consider making this from a single piece of material - i.e. cut the required size from a single sheet. Thus, no joinery is required, and the piece is as strong as it can be.

I would actually go one step further and say that, if it's going to be load bearing, a single piece is the ONLY acceptable way to do it without adding ugly steel plates under the join to strengthen it.

Originally Posted by Digitalx360

Yeah definitely won't have anything heavy on it. Mainly just figurines and some blu-rays - nothing heavy at all.

So the corner has a bookshelf on either side, about 50-60cm from the corner (if that makes sense), so my hope would be to have the L-shaped shelf link them both. I was thinking of adding brackets too for extra support.

OK - this makes more sense now - I thought you were looking to use this to anchor the bookcases into position with each other - you're doing that to a degree, but not in the way I imagined.

I actually still like the concept of cutting this from a single piece - a full sheet of 19/18mm particle board with melamine facing can be had quite cheaply, the remainder of the sheet will be useful for something (almost for sure).

Use some iron on edgebanding, and you can't actually arrive at a simpler solution given limited tools etc (IMO).