Heating Plate

no questions are stupid. I picked up a foiling unit for my Kelsey 5x8 years ago off ebay. the whole bed is heated, you remove the existing bed and insert the heated bed, Kelsey made these for some of their presses although I have never seen another. My windmill has a foiling unit that also has side heaters so you can use type, it only works for a few lines of type, something like the side heaters might work on a pilot but you also need a unit to pull the foil.

I could see someone making a heated chase that would simply slot in and out as any other chase would.

Shouldn’t be too difficult for a machinist to make a chase or chase-base that would take a few heating elements.

Personally I’d love to see someone give it a try.

You may be interested to see how Adana did this.
http://www.briarpress.org/29528

DGM

I did some looking into this as well and found very little info about hot foil stamping on platen presses other than windmills and kluges. So I am attempting to build my own. I plan on using .25” mag dies in a C&P Pilot. Ill post some pictures when I get it finished. My design is to build a removable aluminum bed with Teflon standoffs to insulate the bed from the press. I will heat using an 800 watt cartridge element inside the aluminum and tie that behind a variable resistor to control temp. As far as foil goes I plan on making something identical to the Adana distribution system posted above but running it vertical instead. Not sure how effective it will be but we will see once I get it complete. You might be able to build something similar or have a machinist do it for pretty cheap all my parts have been stock items except the Teflon strips.