Toilet Paper Winder Helper Thing by adlaws

Last crawled date: 4 years, 1 month ago

A helpful tool for winding toiler paper from a large "industrial roll" onto smaller household toilet paper roll.
A few months ago I would have laughed at this, but... we live in strange times. Welcome to the post-COVID-19 era.
Yeah, but...why?!?
So... why? Well, we didn't get into the whole panic buying of toilet paper rolls thing. Eventually, as in the normal course of things, we started to run low on toilet paper, so we tried to buy another pack as we normally would, but... well, you know the story.
The only roll we could find was a 300 metre long "industrial" roll like they use in public toilets. It's horrible thin stuff, but we had little choice, so we bought a roll.
The only problem is you can't put a 300m roll on a household toilet roll holder, so I tried to come up with a way to roll it off the main roll and onto some normal-sized rolls.
Having two thumbs and a 3D printer, this is how I solved the problem.
How does it work?
There's a plate which fits to a drill bit with a hexagonal profile - check the photos in case this is unclear.
The drill bit I used for this is just a Phillips head driver bit - the hexagonal profile is 6.5mm thick if you measure it flat side to opposite flat side, or about 7.2mm corner to opposite corner, and the plate fits snugly to this size. I have no idea how standard this size is, so check your drill bit against this before you print.
The other side is the axle to hold in your hand. While you could probably hold it between your fingers, I highly recommend using a 608 skateboard bearing (buy the cheapest ones you can find) which the "nub" will fit fairly snugly. I didn't want it to be a permanent use for the bearing, so it's a "firm" fit, but you can easy pull it off again with finger strength. Hopefully one day I'll be able to buy normal toilet paper again, and then I can take up skateboarding instead of winding toilet paper by hand, and then perhaps that bearing will fulfil its true destiny.
The plate and the axle have a conical profile starting at with a 40mm diameter at the base and finishing with a 36mm diameter at the top - this is to allow it to work with the variance of toilet paper rolls inner diameters that I came across. Now that is a sentence I never thought I would write.
Enough already! How do I use it?
Anyway, let's get winding! Grab an old toilet roll, because we are all saving those now, right? Not just for kids art and craft any more... who would have thunk it?
Fit the disc side to the drill, and push one end of the toilet paper roll onto that. Next, grab the axle handle, and use it to hold the toilet paper roll onto the drill. Using a firm but gentle pressure, so that the conical sections can "bite" and provide enough friction to spin the roll, but not so hard that you split the toilet roll.
Use a bit of sticky tape to fasten the end of the larger "source" toilet paper onto the "destination" roll, and start up the drill slowly so you don't rip the toilet paper - you can speed up a bit once it gets going. What's the rush? You're stuck indoors now anyway - take your time!
Keep rolling until you think you've got enough, and then you're done... with that roll. Plenty more where that came from - grab another empty roll and get cracking!
Again, look at the pictures if any of this is unclear.