What to Do if you Wrap Laminating Film Around the Rollers on your Roll Laminator
If you work at a school and you haven’t had a teacher or parent volunteer wrap laminating film around the rollers of your laminator, consider yourself lucky. It seems like nearly every school secretary has a at least one horror story involving someone loading the school laminator incorrectly. And trust, me it isn’t too hard to make a big mess. However, it isn’t the end of the world. Here are a few quick steps to follow to get your laminator back up and running again …
First, DO NOT PANIC. Wrapping laminating film around the rollers of your machine is not going to ruin the laminator. However, if you panic and decide to try to scrape the laminating film off with a razor blade knife (true story) or run the motor continuously while the machine is jammed (also a true story) you might ruin the laminator. Just remain calm, stop the laminator from running and under no circumstances use anything sharp on those rollers.
After you have calmed down, you are ready to get down to the business of fixing your laminator. The first step in this process is cut off the unlaminated material so that no more laminate can wrap around the rollers. To do this simply cut the unlaminated material before it reaches the roller. Again, be very careful not to touch the rollers with anything sharp.
After the unlaminated material is cut loose from the machine the next step is to try to get any loose laminating film off of the machine. Depending on how much material is wrapped around the rollers of the machine this may or may not be difficult. It is often much easier to remove the film from the rollers when they are hot. Of course, be careful not to burn yourself on the hot rollers. However, the rollers don’t actually get that hot and you should be able to work with the laminator when the rollers are heated.
After you have done your best to peel all of the laminating film off the rollers that you can, you will probably notice that there is still residue left on the rollers. If you leave this residue it will stick to any new laminating film that you load and cause you to wrap film around the rollers again. Thus you need to remove. The easiest way to accomplish this is using a scouring pad (one of those green ones from the kitchen) while the rollers are still hot. You can use the motor of the laminator to advance the rollers as needed to make sure that all of the areas of the roller are clean. Be sure to remove all of the residue from the silicon rollers. Once the rollers are completely clean you will be ready to load film onto your laminator again.
As you can probably tell, cleaning a laminator with film wrapped around the rollers is not incredibly fun and can be somewhat time consuming. However, new rollers for most school roll laminators cost 0 or more so there is definitely incentive for cleaning them off. Then when you are finished, remember to make sure that your volunteers know how to properly load the laminator to make sure that it doesn’t get wrapped up again.
Jeff McRitchie is the designer and Director of Marketing for MyBinding.com. He has written over 100 articles on laminators, laminating supplies,binding machines,binding supplies and more.
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