how would you cut a roll of paper towels in half

I cannot help you, but this man possibly could...

(completely useless, but I could not resist)

This is probably the best excuse to buy a samurai sword you'll ever find. Or a bandsaw.

Or napkins.

OR! I assume these get dried a bit after soaking, right? That is, they don't go from soaking in the magic liquid right into...use. In that case, why not a 5 gallon bucket and a some of these?

May be cheaper per towel than kitchen paper towels, and certainly more durable.

So whats the recipe?

Joey

1 cup Lysol liquid + 1 cup water.

Oh, wait a minute, that's her recipe for disinfectant wipes.

I'll have to check on the baby wipes.

2 cups hot tap water, 1/4 cup baby wash, 1/4 cup baby oil.

GRM, meet the Frugal Housewife...

Dangit, Gubby..ya beat me to it!

IIRC, cutting rolled up tatami mats actually was a practice technique back in medieval Japan because the density is similar to that of a human limb..

A broad axe or a rapier

alex wrote: This is probably the best excuse to buy a samurai sword you'll ever find.

Make it dual katanas. Solves your towel problem or whatever, and you'll have two sweet katanas.

2 Sweet Katanas?

I'd stop messing around with power tools and grab the torch.

I might try making a batch of homebrew wipes - something I never really thought about.

I wonder what would happen if I put a few rolls of paper towells on the train tracks and waited. Don't think it would work better than a bandsaw, but it would be better than using a torch.

chknhwk wrote: Heat *might* be an issue though...

Use an air or nitrogen assist jet, and crank up the pressure - it'll make a lot of smoke, but the flames get blown away from the cutting area before they can spread.

Yes, I do have some firsthand experience - I didn't try it with a roll of paper towels, but a laser will cut corrugated cardboard just fine. Not sure we had a long enough focal lens to use on a towel roll, though.

I've got a notebook full of pictures at home from an old engineer who used to work somewhere where they made toilet paper or something. They made it in huge rolls, like rolls of carpet or larger and slice it.

At the composite place I worked we had a big saw for slicing long rolls of fiberglass cloth into smaller rolls. It was essentially a bandsaw where the roll rotated and the saw blade was fixed.

MadScientistMatt wrote:

chknhwk wrote: Heat *might* be an issue though...

Use an air or nitrogen assist jet, and crank up the pressure - it'll make a lot of smoke, but the flames get blown away from the cutting area before they can spread. Yes, I do have some firsthand experience - I didn't try it with a roll of paper towels, but a laser will cut corrugated cardboard just fine. Not sure we had a long enough focal lens to use on a towel roll, though.

All this time, I thought the "madscientist" part of your nym was fiction. You may be my new hero, Matt.

Would an electric knife (aka: turkey carver) work?

Thanks for the tip

Sharp axe

Very sharp large non-serated butcher knife preferably sharpened at a low angle - Japanese style, not western.

Straight razor

Table saw - messy

Plasma torch.

From my demented teenage brain:

Chainsaw, claymore, jaws-of-life, chaingun, wet kitten, tying-to-a-railroad-track, or my girlfriend's teeth.

Those are the best sharp objects of their kind that I know of...

a fleet of canoes, i swear

fritzsch wrote: a fleet of canoes, i swear

I don't think canoes are very good at cutting paper...

I found a large shear press worked great. Of course we had one and I didn't have to pay to use it. Set in three flattened rolls with wrappers on and hit button!

How about one of these

http://www.harborfreight.com/variable-speed-multifunction-power-tool-67537.html

Use a cable saw, they're designed to cut down small trees and should rip through paper towels in about 5 seconds.

@Curtis73: The whole point of those things is that they don't rotate, so they don't cut into anything that isn't rigid. That's why doctors use a similar tool to cut off casts. I have the craftsman C3 one and you can put your finger right on the blade, it just vibrates the crap out of it. That's all it would to do a towel roll as well.

Um... buy napkins instead?