I was making nachos the other day as a snack, and it took me perhaps 5 minutes to grate the cheese, sprinkle on the chips, and then microwave. By the time I was approaching the end of my snack, the cheese was congealing and was no longer pleasantly toasty. My idea is that if you were to slightly modify the classic hot melt glue gun, you could have a cheese melting device to squirt hot cheese directly onto your tortilla chips.

There are several benifits to this idea over the traditional grate-and-microwave method (including a reduction of cheese-cancer.) The first is that you skip the step of grating, instead inserting pre-formed cheese sticks into your Hot Melt Cheese Gun. This would save you several valuable minutes. Second, you could squirt the cheese directly onto the chips as you eat them, thereby eliminating both the cold, congealed lumps of cheese at the bottom of your plate of nachos and the disgustingly soggy chips that have soaked for too long in the cheese oil or guacamole if applied. In food service applications where multiple plates of nachos have to be made over the course of the meal period, the Hot Melt Cheese Gun could be left hot and used as needed, speeding turnaround times on melted-cheese hors d'oevres as no oven time would be required.

As for the mechanics of the device, I propose that the standard hot melt glue gun design be modified to take the larger caliber "String Cheese" format and have a slightly more elaborate feeding mechanism to compensate for the softer nature of the material being melted. A plunger type feed would probably be more appropriate than the pivoting sleeve found in your common glue gun, and an absolute necessity with softer or crumbly cheese loads, such as Brie or Feta. Another change needed would be to waterproof and ground the housing to make washing less dangerous and to remove the possibility of a grease fire in the melting chamber being caused by internal sparking. Other than that I think the design would work rather well, as melting cheese is self lubricating. The existance of a readily available mozzerella cheese stick would enable instant adoption, but some sort of cheese-drawing die (as those used to make wire) would need to be included in the kit so that the consumer could load whatever cheese met their preference. This would allow the creation of cheese sticks of say Wensleydale or Old Amsterdam which would most likely be too expensive or low volume to justify the production of a formed cheese stick commercially.