Remember the beginning of lockdown, when pretty much overnight, toilet paper became almost impossible to buy? I still don’t understand what happened. But when our own inventory began to run perilously low and the store shelves were still empty, I did the only sensible thing.
I bought a case of jumbo bathroom-stall toilet paper from McMaster-Carr.
For someone accustomed to fluffy grocery-store TP, these rolls were impressive to behold: 300 meters long, improbably dense, surprisingly abrasive, strangely unperforated, and… way too big to fit on a normal dispenser.
It was time to employ one of my standard engineering solutions: build an adapter. Fortunately I had a suitable scrap of Baltic birch already covered with Shaper tape, ready for cutting, helping to qualify this job as an elusive one-night woodworking project.
Behold.
Time seemed to come to a standstill during lockdown, but the really surprising thing about these commercial TP rolls was how much they amplified the effect by basically never running out.
In case you were wondering, we’ve gone back to normal TP.