KEY POINTS:
For 58 years Formica, technically high-pressure laminate, came out of the Papakura factory, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
It was regarded by many overseas as the most efficient of its type in the world, according to Graham Mackenzie, Formica's New Zealand managing director in the 1980s.
The business was a wholly owned subsidiary of giant United States manufacturer Cyanamid. Formica managers in New Zealand paid royalties and dividends to Cyanamid for the use of the name and trademark to make the glossy surfaces so many of us have come to know.
Staff took special brown craft paper, which gives Formica its distinctive dark edge, then highly decorative paper imported in more recent years from Japan, giving the glowing colours and patterns.
They combined that with resins - made by Formica at its factories around the world and manufactured to a formula - and finally, giant rolls of paper. All the products went into presses which, Mackenzie recalls, were 12 foot by four foot, measured on the Imperial scale.
"Under enormous pressure, the resins melted and a controlled chemical reaction occurred which produced what we know as the beautiful product of Formica."
New Zealand Forest Products supplied Formica NZ with those large rolls of brown Kraft saturating paper. That was passed through a bath of melamine formaldehyde resin and saturated with the resin.
The resin-soaked paper was cut into 12 foot x 4 foot pieces and stored in humidity and temperature-controlled rooms. The coloured decorative paper was passed through a resin bath and saturated, cut into the same 12 x 4 feet lengths and stored under the same conditions.
Sheets of Kraft paper and one sheet of coloured paper were assembled between two polished steel plates. The assembled material and the plates were then inserted into the press which was super-heated.
The resin melted together and cured via a chemical reaction.
Last April 10, high-pressure laminate production ceased at Formica in Auckland and David Worley, head of the Australian-based Laminex Group, one of NZX-listed Fletcher's five divisions, said it was the end of an era. He expressed sorrow and said the property would be sold.
