How do you make your own lye?

[~gd]

From my reading, it should be a chicken feather (don't know why yet) Waterfowl feathers are usually water resistant because of the oil used while preening ~gd and if the lye is too weak you can pour it back through the ashes again. There are claims that the straw will discolor the lye at first but after it's been used several times it will be bleached out and the discoloration will cease...They also claim that hardwood ashes work better than ashes from poplar or other soft woods and only the completely burned white ashes should be used...

 

[Joel_BC]

Lye based drain cleaner usually has aluminum shavings in it. When the lye and alum. get wet the chemical reaction is what breaks down the fats in the drain line. At least that's what I remember from chemistry class.

You're right about one part - a lot of commercial drain cleaners do have aluminum and lye in them. But, when I mentioned my own experience with lye breaking down vegetable matter and thereby unclogging drains, I was referring to something different. My experience has been with white, granular commercial lye, bought in bulk (1 gallon) - pure lye.

I know that if lye is mixed with aluminum and water, it produces hydrogen gas. Not toxic, but highly flammable.

 

[1Brotherbill]

From what I gather. Wood ash produces Calcium Hydroxide or Potash. Commercial "Lye" is Sodium Hydroxide. You can't get commercial lye from wood ash. You get it from Calcium Carbonate and other chemicals.

Calcium Hydroxide produces a softer soap which now days most people use for liquid soap. I'm not sure but I think you can add salt to make the soap harder. We use to do that in the shampoo factory to make a thicker product. Might work with a bar of soap I'm not sure. Also you could add more fats like Lard and such to make the soap more solid.

I tried to make soap years ago but I could never find pure Sodium Hydroxide easily. So I kind of gave up on the whole hobby. I figure that I could make a decent bar of soap today but it's much easier to get it from the store. I'm lazy like that.

 

[Boogity]

I guess I'm still a little puzzled about how our grandmothers and great grandmothers made hard soap. One of my earliest memories is a visit to my granny's farm in Whitesburg, KY (S.E. Kentucky - 1948 or 1949 - I think I was 5 or 6 years old) and her trying to teach my sister and me how to make what she called "lyesoap". My sister got a pretty bad burn on her hand when she reached down into a wooden bucket of granny's homebrew lye. Her soap was very hard and it didn't smell very good.

Another memory of that time period was that my grand parents did not have any indoor plumbing. My sister and I had to take a shower outside under a wooden tub of water with a rope hanging down to pull to open a valve of some sort to allow the water to flow. The tub was filled by a big pipe that stretched through some woods from a spring. The water was ice cold all year 'round and the valve always stuck open and poured a solid stream of icewater on your head. It was torture! Maybe that's how the old tradition of showering once a week started.

One day a guy came along on a horse drawn wagon to deliver lump coal to my grandpa. Grandpa wasn't ready to unload the coal yet so the guy sat on his wagon waiting. My mom was taking her shower under the tub about 30 ft. away and she accidentally bumped the wooden gate (a makeshift privacy fence) open and the guy on the wagon watched her take her shower for 5 or 10 minutes. My grandpa ran him off with a shotgun. I guess that was the good old days.

 

[k15n1]

My favorite page on this topic seems to be down. You can view it with the Internet Time Machine:

http://web.archive.org/web/20100607233403/http://www.fryingcolors.com/k2co3.html

 

[~gd]

From what I gather. Wood ash produces Calcium Hydroxide or Potash. Commercial "Lye" is Sodium Hydroxide. You can't get commercial lye from wood ash. You get it from Calcium Carbonate and other chemicals. Sorry but your chemistry is sooo wrong. If you take wood ash and leach it you get POTASH which is a mixture of various salts mostly based on POTassium. Sodium is not used buy most woody plants but those that will grow with low amounts of sea (salt) water should contain more and produce more sodium hydroxide in the ash and potash. Sodium Hydroxide today is produced from sodium chloride solution by passing a DC current through the solution. Chlorine is driven off as gas and the sodium attaches itself to the water. Calcium Hydroxide is often called LIME a substance with many uses but I don't think soap making is one of them. In the old days Lime was produced by burning bones, shells or rocks that were rich in Calcium [limestone] this would produce calcium oxide and when mixed with water would go to calcinm hydroxide ~gd

Calcium Hydroxide produces a softer soap which now days most people use for liquid soap. I'm not sure but I think you can add salt to make the soap harder. We use to do that in the shampoo factory to make a thicker product. Might work with a bar of soap I'm not sure. Also you could add more fats like Lard and such to make the soap more solid.

I tried to make soap years ago but I could never find pure Sodium Hydroxide easily. So I kind of gave up on the whole hobby. I figure that I could make a decent bar of soap today but it's much easier to get it from the store. I'm lazy like that.

 

[1Brotherbill]

One day a guy came along on a horse drawn wagon to deliver lump coal to my grandpa. Grandpa wasn't ready to unload the coal yet so the guy sat on his wagon waiting. My mom was taking her shower under the tub about 30 ft. away and she accidentally bumped the wooden gate (a makeshift privacy fence) open and the guy on the wagon watched her take her shower for 5 or 10 minutes. My grandpa ran him off with a shotgun. I guess that was the good old days.

I thought this was going to go down a severely wrong path for a minute there.

I have a feeling that your grandmas soap was not a product of the lye mixture as much as a product of the fats used for the soap. Do you remember what she used for the fats?

 

[1Brotherbill]

From what I gather. Wood ash produces Calcium Hydroxide or Potash. Commercial "Lye" is Sodium Hydroxide. You can't get commercial lye from wood ash. You get it from Calcium Carbonate and other chemicals. Sorry but your chemistry is sooo wrong. If you take wood ash and leach it you get POTASH which is a mixture of various salts mostly based on POTassium. Sodium is not used buy most woody plants but those that will grow with low amounts of sea (salt) water should contain more and produce more sodium hydroxide in the ash and potash. Sodium Hydroxide today is produced from sodium chloride solution by passing a DC current through the solution. Chlorine is driven off as gas and the sodium attaches itself to the water. Calcium Hydroxide is often called LIME a substance with many uses but I don't think soap making is one of them. In the old days Lime was produced by burning bones, shells or rocks that were rich in Calcium [limestone] this would produce calcium oxide and when mixed with water would go to calcinm hydroxide ~gd

Calcium Hydroxide produces a softer soap which now days most people use for liquid soap. I'm not sure but I think you can add salt to make the soap harder. We use to do that in the shampoo factory to make a thicker product. Might work with a bar of soap I'm not sure. Also you could add more fats like Lard and such to make the soap more solid.

I tried to make soap years ago but I could never find pure Sodium Hydroxide easily. So I kind of gave up on the whole hobby. I figure that I could make a decent bar of soap today but it's much easier to get it from the store. I'm lazy like that.

Is it just me or should this post bother me?

 

[Hinotori]

If you add enough salt when making liquid soap, you might be able to harden it into a bar.

I just can't remember how Great Grandma made her bar soap. She may have just bought lye as I'm from the high desert and sagebrush is the dominate big plant.

 

[~gd]

From what I gather. Wood ash produces Calcium Hydroxide or Potash. Commercial "Lye" is Sodium Hydroxide. You can't get commercial lye from wood ash. You get it from Calcium Carbonate and other chemicals. Sorry but your chemistry is sooo wrong. If you take wood ash and leach it you get POTASH which is a mixture of various salts mostly based on POTassium. Sodium is not used buy most woody plants but those that will grow with low amounts of sea (salt) water should contain more and produce more sodium hydroxide in the ash and potash. Sodium Hydroxide today is produced from sodium chloride solution by passing a DC current through the solution. Chlorine is driven off as gas and the sodium attaches itself to the water. Calcium Hydroxide is often called LIME a substance with many uses but I don't think soap making is one of them. In the old days Lime was produced by burning bones, shells or rocks that were rich in Calcium [limestone] this would produce calcium oxide and when mixed with water would go to calcinm hydroxide ~gd

Calcium Hydroxide produces a softer soap which now days most people use for liquid soap. I'm not sure but I think you can add salt to make the soap harder. We use to do that in the shampoo factory to make a thicker product. Might work with a bar of soap I'm not sure. Also you could add more fats like Lard and such to make the soap more solid.

I tried to make soap years ago but I could never find pure Sodium Hydroxide easily. So I kind of gave up on the whole hobby. I figure that I could make a decent bar of soap today but it's much easier to get it from the store. I'm lazy like that.

Is it just me or should this post bother me?

It was not my intent to bother you, that is why my first word was Sorry. You are not bad or dumb because you don't have your Chemistry straight, lots of people don't know chemistry, most of the time in modern life you don't need it, you just buy the products that are formulated by Chemists. When writing about how to make your own lye, it becomes important so I felt the need to correct what you had posted. I majored in chemistry and worked in the field for 40+ years. Again I am sorry if my corrections bothered you.~gd