Help me select a laminator

[Dan Moos]

Ok, I went on Amazon looking for a laminator for toner transfer, and I'm completely lost.

There are TONS in the thirty dollar and less range, and that's what I hope to spend.

Since a laminator's ability to feed a PCB and melt toner aren't the sort of specs one finds on Amazon, I'm asking for help here.

What are SPECIFIC models known to work, hopefully in that price bracket or close.

I don't want to modify one if it can be helped. My understanding is that most mods just slow the thing down. I'm just fine doing multiple passes if that means no mod needed. I'd rather not go to the trouble doing a mod until I know I have a working system.

[Dan Moos]

In this application, i think folks are slowing the motor, and raising the heat.

I  just bought a cheap Swingline GBC laminator. Out of the box, it was too cool. The trick I see people doing is to put a resister in series with the temp sensing thermister so the comparator that switches the heater triggers later.

Not knowing the resistance of this particular thermister at either end of the devices temp range, i didnt even know if I was dealing with 10s, hundreds, or thousands of ohm spread here. Thus begins my cautionary tale. 

I used a 10k pot wired as a variable resister, and took temp measurements. Sure enough, I could raise the heat level, but 10k was too big!. The good news is i got a decent transfer. the bad news is I eventually melted the centers of the gears on the roller shafts! I have since switched to a 1k pot, and seem to get a temp at the rollers that varies between 164 and 174 C as the heater comes off and on. Its my understanding that this is the sweet spot temp-wise. I'm hoping some epoxy heals my melted gear centers. I just gotta make sure I get stuff that can take the heat!

As an aside, I'm amazed at how little heat shielding there is in this plastic gadget. The thermistor and the thermal fuse wires are heat wrapped, but everything else is not. Seems like it would take much for a problem to arise!

[tautech]

Dan, my old Rexel laminator is not only adjustable for heat but it does take some time to fully warm up.
It has a temp ok light that I'll wait a couple of minutes more to ensure full heat is reached and the entire warmup takes a good 5 minutes.
Yours might be somewhat different but despite that I'd resist modding it.

I might've been lucky with mine, however it does require 2 passes with the PCB in the card carrier sleeve.

I've never need to tape the TT to a PCB but I do print onto a snippet of transfer medium (TT paper) that's stuck to a full sheet of A4 after adjusting printer settings to print in the middle of the paper.
Print to plain paper first then stick the medium over the image and print again.
IMO the printing heat of 2 passes through the printer helps reduce any printing shrinkage errors.

Good luck.