Don't put just any plastic in your laminator. (Experiment)

     It's one of those do as I say and not as I do stories and it goes like this. Basically some months ago I found a laminator at the dumpster. First thing I did when I took it home was to plug it in to see if it works. At the time it didn't work and when pressing the power button would only turn on for a split second. At that point I didn't go any further into troubleshooting the laminator because I didn't have any time and just like that it sat forgotten in the basement for many months. A few days ago I had the need to whip up some PCB's quickly and I remembered that I have a laminator which I could use to make the PCB's.

    So I dug the laminator out from the pile of stuff it sat in and plugged it in to confirm that it still doesn't work. And of course it didn't. So I pulled it apart to check if there's anything obvious inside and there wasn't so I thought what would hapen if I held the power switch pressed in. So I held the power switch in and it did the same thing so just before I moved on I did it again and the power light stayed on this time. For the first few seconds the brightness of the LED fluctuated as if the laminator wanted to shut off but it persevered and now the laminator works fine. I don't know what was wrong with the laminator but my magic touch fixed it and that all that counts. 

    Now that the laminator works it was time to make some PCB's but stupid me got distracted and forgot to buy some special photopaper that I use for toner transfer. So for for the time being I just experimented around with the laminator. I dug around my stuff and looked for whatever plastic I could fit in the laminator. First I tried some plastic sheet from an old LCD and this sheet didn't seem to melt or do anything at all. Next I tried some polyethylene pouches for documents and these melted but in a rather weird way. I had slipped a sheet of paper inside to see it it would get laminated but the plastic just melted apart and got completely ruined. I had the suspicion that some of the plastic got stuck in the rollers but before I stopped I tried a ziplock bag and this one completely melted. I tried folding a piece of paper and putting a piece of the ziplock bag inside just to see what would happen to the melted plastic then. Once the paper came out of the other side I tried carefully pulling it apart but it was just barely stuck together. Once I opened the piece of paper up the plastic was completely gone and the only thing left was a slightly shiny spot on the paper. It seems the plastic had soaked into the paper.

    After these exeriments my laminator started stinking like burning plastic and at this point I knew that it had to be pulled apart and cleaned out. Fortunately this is a rather well designed laminator and it's reasonably easy to disassemble. Once I had taken the top cover off I could disassemble the roller assembly and clean it out. And when I pulled the roller assembly apart I could see the true extent of the mess I had made.

    In the picture above the mica heater can be seen inside and alimuminum extrusion within which the red rubber roller rotates. Along the upper part plastic can be seen stuck to the aluminum extrusion, which was quite easy to peel off actually. There are two heated rollers each with their own heater and also two cold rollers, which I assume work to cool and guide the laminated sheet. 

    The lower heater also had some plastic stuck to it but it seems like there's much less on this one.

    The rollers were the hardest to clean up. Along with the plastic there was some paper and even some small flakes of mica from the heaters. This plastic was much harder and I assume this is the polyethylene from the document pouch and the plastic stuck to the heater looked like it came from the ziplock bag. The plastic on the rollers was much harder to remove and fortunately the rollers were made of a rather robust rubber so I could scrape the plastic off with the backside of my scissor blade. After the laminator was cleaned up I tested it out and it still works fine although there's still the lingering smell of burning plastic to remind me not to stick random stuff in there again. All in all it took a couple hours to disassemble, clean and then reassemble the laminator so I don't think I'll be experimenting with random plastics anytime soon.

And that's it for now, thanks for visiting my blog.