^Some Brother printers don't work. If your google-fu is good, you can figure it out by looking up cartridges and MSDS's. When I did this maybe 10 years ago, there was only a small percentage of Brother printers that used the weird ingredients.
I also found my old A4 Creative laminator. Any advice on how to use it?
Mine is a GBC Creative. It came with a dual tone blue plastic cover. I found it will stall out (start to skip gears, actually; the motor doesn't stall) on a full thickness 0.06" board. I egged out the holes in the plastic that hold the ends of the top roller just a bit, so that these boards will fit. There are leaf springs on either end that push the roller down, so this doesn't affect smaller boards. It just opens up the max thickness, a little.
edit: you have to be careful not to widen the hole. You want to lengthen it just a tad, into the beginnings of a slot. You don't want it any bigger in diameter, else I imagine there would be problems. I didn't have any, but I was careful and kept that in mind.
Personally, I threw out the plastic cover and just screwed the thing down to a wood board, using the 4 screw holes in the bottom of the innards. The board extends out past the right side of the laminator for enclosing the wiring and switch. The thing should be considered live, though. It's definitely a shock hazard. No bare feet when using it. If the board is wet, you can shock yourself even with the cover on, I have found. Take care.
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At first, I was happy with this laminator, all by itself. It was fairly reliable up to maybe 2x2" boards. Just playing around. But then when doing larger boards, it stopped being reliable. Not enough heat, no matter how many slow trips through. I think after 3 passes, maybe, you're not getting hotter, anymore. That's why I use the heat gun and the pre-etch.
The heatgun fixed the initial problem. But it revealed a new one: smeared/fattened transfers when the temp gets too high, resulting in a loss of effective fidelity/resolution, and producing inspection problems at any rate. Lots of sketchy things to examine before populating this board, due to artifacts.
Because the main ingredient in regular toner is wax, the melting range is fairly narrow. It doesn't go from solid to liquid exactly like water does. The more complex a wax is, the more it actually has different parts that melt in a range of temp. Beeswax is a natural example. But the range could be very narrow, as well. Then, the liquid:solid ratio is a phase change. The amount of TIME you keep it at this temp also matters. Else the toner melts like a snowflake in the sun. The printer regulates temp of a piece of paper, which is a small mass and a predictable thing. It can do this way better than we can the analogy with a copper clad board. Esp the larger it gets, and the more you have to account that it has a size and shape. It's not a point-object or one with perfect thermal conduction.
edit: Trying to partially melt the toner is a lot like cooking a pizza. You can make your pizza, and it comes out fine, but you learned exactly how long to set the timer. Now make a pizza way bigger or smaller. There's no easy formula, and the copper clad is a composite of 2 materials with very different density and thermal conductance. For the pizza, you use experience and your baking skill. And sometimes it works on the first try; sometimes it doesn't. And any pockets that are over or underdone will likely result in a complete board failure/redo when the traces get sub 10 mil. You can't repair those with a sharpie.
So now, the first thought is probably the same as mine was. How to achieve that precise of a temp and baking time for varying-sized boards in a practical way? I imagine math. Calculations. Correction factors. Pre-heaters, ramp-ups, reflow profiles, computer simulations? But this question, I never had to answer. I found another way to do it.
The pre-etch eventually solved this second problem. But only after learning that you need to get it even hotter, to start with, but now pie's the limit.
In case anyone has a different experience, I'm curious to learn from it!
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