I’ve built a couple of 3D printers and throughout that process I’ve always bought a few spares for when things go up in smoke.
I had a spare control board and heater cartridges. So it was an easy job to mount the heater cartridge inside a piece of copper, along with a thermisistor and heat sink compound.
So I’ve managed to get a PID controlled heat sealer. Totally over the top, but if you’ve got the parts lying around doing nothing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PID_controller
Eventually the wooden handle got scorched so I ended up dismantling an old soldering iron and mounting it all on the end of that. I also moved the temperature sensor to the outside because I suspected the internal temp was much hotter than the external surface temp.
The heater is a 12v ceramic cartridge:
I guess you could probably drive one of these with an adjustable 12v power supply.
