DIY Wire Soap Loaf Cutter ($12)

My soap collection has been slowly building.  One thing I’ve noticed is that the bars are rarely uniformly cut.   No matter how hard I try that cheap little soap cutter is just doing a poor job.

I’m talking about one of these bamboo box jobbers with a  planer:

It seems like it would work well, but there’s too much play in the gap where the knife goes.  And these boxes are never tall enough for your soap, so the first inch or so of soap cutting you’re pretty much guessing where you should cut until you hit the slot for the knife.

So what everyone really wants is a wire soap loaf cutter.  They come in a single wire and many cut whole loafs of soap at once.   Just take a look at the etsy pages for wire soap cutters.   Some of them are really quite nice and people put a lot of effort into making a quality cutter.   But, let’s be honest, most of the time you can’t justify spending that much money on some wood and wire.   Especially, us hobbyists.

So I made my own, all I needed was a cheap cheese slicer off amazon, some popsicle sticks and glue.   I chose this cutter because it was actually quite large and the size of my soap loaf would not be an issue.   While I can’t imagine why I would ever need it too,  it could easily handle a loaf over 7″ tall.   Some of you get crazy with the soap frosting and inclusions, so this might be important to you.

Starting with the popsicle sticks, I glued 3 together for some height.   This will be my guide on the board.  I’ll need 2 of these guides, so I glued 6 together in total.    Obviously, you could use some scrap wood, shims or any number of other items to make a guide, but I’m going for super cheap and I already had a huge box of popsicle sticks from my miniature crafts.

I clamped a ruler down to the board to mark how large I wanted my bars.  Most Soapers cut their soap to be around 1 inch thick so I clamped the ruler down and glued my popsicle sticks directly to the board at the 1″ mark.

Then, I glued my second guide down.    The glue I was using was from one of my miniature kits, so it actually adhered in under a minute.   This whole project took less than 5 minutes.

Finally, I grabbed one of my soap loafs and gave it a shot.   It worked flawlessly and cut like butter.

Although, don’t do what I did in this picture.  Put your loaf on it’s side if you have inclusions on the top of the soap.   I learned pretty quickly the wire would drag my lavender flowers pieces right through the center of the bar leaving a huge scrape down the middle.

And there you go, the $12 wire soap loaf cutter.