Laminator ideas (untested :-).
> The digital temperature controller looks nice and hard to figure out
If you are ok with reading a manual you can work out most temperature controllers, it is a single setpoint so not rocket science.
The correct way to slow those tiny motors is to drop the frequency.
You would need to make a low wattage inverter and then use a mains:6V transformer backwards to drive the motor. They will be happy with a square wave (or a three level sine wave approximation) as long as they do not over heat and this you can control with the voltage. You should be able to control from 30 to 150% without too much trouble I recon. They are essentially el-cheapo stepper motors with one winding proken and could be replaced with a low voltage flat stepper and suitable drive circuit if you find a reasonable mechanical fit you gould sprice on to the input rotor shaft, a little stepper will not direct drive the rollers reliably. It would let you run it fast when idle to have evenly distributed temperature and then run slowly at any speed you want to feed a board through.
The AC motors may give slightly erratic results if you use a stop start method to regulate the speed as they are usually single phase motors that start in either direction, there is a tiny little cam inside that causes the motor to hit a stop and bounce into the opposite direction half of the time when it starts, takes less than one turn of the rotor to engage so not likely to be much distance but still a random variable that might be better left out.
> Others have said 4 or 5 passes is needed, so 4 times off-to-on
> ratio seems about right. Maybe less since multiple pass allow
> cooling.
In one office I visited years ago they had a interesting laminator that had two sets of rollers with radiant heating between them, the rollers would also warm up, so the material was pushed and pulled carefully through. With these home/office laminators it might make sense to put two of them one behind the other (lot of work), one would do the bulk of the heating of the substrate and the other would then squash the evenly heated stuff together, perhaps more pressure on the second roller.
Kalle
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Johannesburg, South Africa