Man, dead blogs are the best blogs. That typesetter probably spent hours uploading those press photos one by one, then just stopped cold in 2019. There's a guy who ran a site about old diner coffee cups, last update 2016, and I still check it like it might come back. The machines in that Asheville post are probably half scrapped by now, which is a bummer. Those blogs are like time capsules nobody meant to make.

Yeah but that's exactly the thing, a showroom door that sat in their shop for six years isn't the same as a cabinet that lives next to a dishwasher and gets hit with steam every single night. I've seen too many prefinished panels bubble up along those factory edges once real humidity cycles hit them, and then you're stuck with a board you can't sand down or touch up without it looking like a scar. The factory finish might be thin enough to flex with the wood, but my field finish I can control, I can build it up thick where I need it, and if it fails I can fix it without tearing the whole panel out. Spending 20 minutes with a guy who sells the stuff is not a durability test, that's just marketing with a friendly face. I'll keep buying raw maple and doing the extra coats myself, at least when my finish fails I know it's my fault and my fix. What happens when that fancy prefinished edge finally lets go in year ten, are you going to rip the whole cabinet apart?