[Tigratrus]

For those of you who may be interested in Stainless Steel sinks, as I am, I just noticed something during our trip to IKEA this weekend. The bowls of IKEA's stainless sinks are SIGNIFICANTLY thicker than the surround is. As you probably know, one of the biggest factors in the quality/durability of a stainless sink, is the gauge(thickness) of the steel used, It looks like what IKEA does is weld a thicker bowl to a thinner surround, and the then grind the seam down to form a nice bevel where the bowl meets the surround. I'd guess that this process allows them to save a significant amount on the manufacturing process which would explain why their sinks seem to be substantially less expensive than comparable Stainless sinks from other companies.

Maybe this is a prosess used by other manufacturers, and I simply haven't noticed? ::shrug:: The end result is a really NICE heavy gauge sink bowl though, just knock on them the next time you're in a store and you'll see what I mean. I was very impressed with the overall quality. I'll append a few pictures so that you can see for yourself:


First a shot with the bevel visible from the top:



Then the material stamp on the bottom of the bowl itself, showing the actual thickness:





Then a shot of the joint from the bottom where you can sort of see the shickness difference, and you can see the flange that is used to mount it to the countertop:

[GardenOfDarwin]

Since we're posting pics of stainless sinks, here's the corner (butterfly) sink installed:



The view from underneath...



Also, the new Numerar sink is pictured on the Our trip to IKEA thread.

Susan