Corian® Repair Chapter 1

Before repairing Corian® or other solid surface material it is necessary to understand why it might crack. Often an underlying problem should be repaired first.

Why would this incredibly strong material crack. The simple answer is stress. This can come from a strong impact or a pressure point. An accelerating factor can be a stress riser. A stress riser is a sharp groove such as saw tooth marks or a sharp inside corner cut. In my experience both of these are most often found in a cut out for the installation of a cooktop. When an inexperienced person installs an integral cook top they will not sand out the saw marks and they will try to make sharp (neat) inside corners. They figure that everything is covered by the cook top and there is no need to clean up the tooth marks. They usually use a saw rather than a router so they have the sharp inside corners.

Where do stresses come from?

They can come from a shifting house or an uneven support structure. Most often it comes from heat. Corian® and most other solid surface materials expand with exposure to heat. For Corian®, this takes some time as its high mineral content absorbs a lot of heat for each degree of temperature rise. However a malfunctioning appliance such as a crockpot or frying pan can produce a relatively small heated area in a large countertop. This expands a small area of the top while the remainder resists this movement. Something has to give. Sometimes a sharp sound is heard when this happens.

Another type of crack which usually appears in older Corian® installations is caused by repeated heating and cooling cycles. These appear in the bottom of sinks into which boiling water is often poured. (Boiling water should always be poured into an equal amount of cold water in the sink or at least with cold water running in the sink.) They also appear around cooktops even those properly installed. These cracks appear because of a different type of stress. Like many other materials Corian® aneals. That is, when heated and cooled its molecules realign. This can cause a small area, exposed to heat on a regular bases, to become smaller. Since the remainder of the countertop resists this change a crack may result.

In the next chapter I will discuss professional and do it yourself repairs for these cracks.