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The putty oven just didn't give me the heat I needed. I ripped out the terrarium heating pad and tried something with a little more horsepower - I took the heating element out of one of those single-cup coffee warmers. It produces more heat, but surprisingly, didn't get the inside of the oven much hotter.

I believe what was happening was that the metal box was conducting the heat right out of the lunchbox. Ming-Hua uses special rubber feet designed for this purpose, but since I didn't have much time, I looked around for something in the house that I could use. I found a small piece of rubber on a spare dremel sanding attachment. I glued it down, glued the heating element to it, and tried again.

Much better luck this time! It popped up to a little over 100°F in about two minutes; the old version took fifteen or twenty minutes to get that warm. I'm still testing now, but the inside of the box feels much warmer with this version even though the thermometer isn't reading that much hotter - probably the metal thermometer was conducting some of the heat from the case before is my guess. Anyway, I'm pretty sure this will work for me until I get the good one from Ming-Hua.

The rubber piece from the dremel attachment glued to the back of the box. This should act as an insulator and keep the heat from getting conducted out of the box.

The heating element from the coffee warmer in glued to the rubber piece. Not the most secure attachment. The scum on the heating element is sculpting wax - I used to use this for heating wax until I gave up on sculpting wax.

The "control panel", which is just the circuit board that controls the coffee heater along with part of the plastic case from the heater.