Why To Not Use Particle Board

In the process of removing some more hardware yesterday I discovered another interesting build detail.

I was attempting to remove the sink from the galley, so I looked under the galley counter to see if there were any fasteners.  There weren't any, but I did notice a lot of water droplets hanging off the underside of the counter.  This was strange, as the boat has been pretty dry for the last couple weeks.

To remove the sink, I moved back up to the top surface of the counter and started scraping away the top surface around the sink.  Here is what I discovered:

Galley counter.

The galley counter was built from particle board with a plastic veneer glued to the upper surface.  The stuff was completely waterlogged, and was just a pile of mush between two intact sheets.

The best and most satisfying method to remove this stuff was beating the hell out of it with a hammer to break up the outer surfaces, then grab it by the handful and pull it out.

This entire surface was removed with those two tools you see.