Can you make a rope out of paper towels strong enough to pull a car? These guys tried
The King of Random, owned and hosted by Grant Thompson, is one of the coolest channels on YouTuve and it’s because of videos like this one, showing just how much potential there is right there in that roll of paper towels you use to dry your hands after washing them.
If you’re thinking of something around the house that could be used to pull a car, that roll of paper towels is likely among the first things to toss aside. After all, when you pull off all the paper towels you need, you just tear them off by hand. Not exactly what anybody would consider strong.
However, as you will see, if you roll the towels up in just the right way, they become a little strong. If you take the rolled up towels and twist them tightly on themselves, they become even stronger. If you take three of those rolled up and twisted sections of paper towels and twist those together, you end up with something that looks an awful lot like a rope.
But is this rope of paper towels really strong enough to qualify as rope, at least when it comes to holding up to some pretty high tension? Well there’s only one way to find out, and that’s exactly what we’re watching in this video below. With a few feet of the paper towel rope in hand, our host ties the front of a car to the rear of a truck and dropped the car into neutral.
The driver of the truck eased into the gas and sure enough, with nothing more than a few feet of paper towel, the truck was able to pull the car. After stopping the car to try again, there was a little slack left in the rope and the shock caused the rope to break on the second attempt, but even after breaking, the rope was still able to hold up Grant’s weight, showing that it still had plenty of usefulness.
To cap the day, Grant decided to wet the paper towels to see how that affected their strength, and as you’d expect, the wet towels gave up the ghost pretty easy. However, it’s pretty cool to see that with nothing more than paper towels, you could possibly tow a car!
