Making a Soap Cutter

All the wood cut and ready

I have really needed a way to cut my soap bars evenly.  Up til now, I have used a wire stretched between 2 dowels.  Needless to say some of my bars have been terribly uneven, downright crooked even.

Since I have all of the wood I need and it was free, it makes sense to make my own.  After looking at a variety of designs, I have settled on a design that is fairly thin when closed.  This design will be adapted to the type and sizes of wood that I have available.  ( My father gets lots of pallets that his company burns if they can't find a use for them.)  So I have taken apart several pallets to scrounge the wood for this.

My cutter will have 21 wires at 3/4 of an inch with one wire spaced evenly in the remaining opening.  I have re-sized my molds to be 5 inches wide.  This will allow for me to cut each piece in half doubling the number of bars that I can make in each mold.  The wire centered in the remaining space will allow me to cut these blocks into 2 bars.

Using my new toy Thank you Live Laugh Rowe!

I started by making a platform for the cutting frame and the base for the soap to rest on.  This platform will be formed by planks laid across 2 cross planks on both sides.  The base for the soap is raised off of the platform further to facilitate cutting.  There is also a stop bar to keep the soap from sliding out of the cutting area.  There is also the frame to hold the wires for cutting the soap.  This frame is attached to the base with 2 hinges.  These hinges allow the frame to be held stable while cutting the soap.  

While putting the frame together, I found that it needed re-enforcement on the top as well as the corner brackets that I had already planned to use.  So I used my new saw to make some decorative curved corner pieces to mount on the top side of the frame.

Corner detail

For the grooves in the wood to allow the wire to descend below the level of the soap, I used my saw on the stop board, although I had to cut each slit more than once in order to make it wide enough to accommodate the wire.  For the wider boards I used a circular saw set at about an eighth of an inch depth. This was a fairly simple to do, but my back was definitely sore by the time I was done cutting all of the grooves.

The soap cutter closed

For right now, the wire will be stretched between eye screws on either side of the frame.  Hopefully I will be able to tighten them as needed to keep the wire snug.  I may end up using screws on one side and the eye screws on the other.  Only time and use will tell how well my current configuration will work.

With the frame raised for cutting

I will post again to show how it works after I get some bar soap made.  It will be interesting to see what modifications I need to make to the design.

Have a wonderful day, and enjoy.



1/22/14 - Couple of notes - 1. Don't make the frame for the wires out of pine.  It is too soft to support the tension that you need to have on the wire.
 2. You need something more like music string tension devices to keep tension on the wire.  I haven't figured out where to get these yet.  If you find a source for something that might work I would be very grateful if you passed the information along.




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