Thermal Laminator Un-jamming

My AmazonBasics laminator wrapped a small card around one of its rollers and jammed solid:

AmazonBasics laminator - interior bottom
AmazonBasics laminator – interior bottom

The lever sticking out on the lower right (above) drives the rollers in reverse by moving the motor from one gear to the other:

AmazonBasics laminator - roller gears
AmazonBasics laminator – roller gears

Obviously, reverse gear wouldn’t get me anywhere, but dismantling the rollers required cutting the junction between the heating elements running through the aluminum extrusions:

AmazonBasics laminator - heater junction
AmazonBasics laminator – heater junction

I spliced a few inches of wire onto those leads. If there’s a next time, I can cut the splice in the middle and use a wire nut.

The white plastic curl in the lower right showed they ran a deburring tool around the exit slot and called it Good Enough™.

The gears slide off the roller shafts and the rollers out of the extrusions, after which removing the tightly wrapped and completely useless card posed no problem.

One lone, short, and eagerly self-tapping screw holds each plastic end plate to the extrusion, so be careful about cross-threading.

All in all, this was easy enough, although I’m sure I was supposed to just throw the laminator away and buy a new one.

Update: If you dislodged some of the wires, a few more pix of the interior may come in handy.

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