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How to make castile bar soap

February 20, 2012 by Karl

Soap berry berry berry

This article will show you how to make your own castile bar soap. If you enjoy using natural soaps, this will show you how save money making it yourself for about $1 US per bar.

First something that needs to be said about soap. There is NO WAY to make bar soap without using lye. It is a physical impossibility. The basic reaction that is needed to make soap, called ‘saponification’, cannot happen without some form of lye reacting with some form of oil. Lye is actually a general term for a very strong alkali (the opposite of acid on the PH spectrum). There are generally two alkali’s that are used in soap making, sodium hydroxide and potassium hydroxide. Both are considered lye, but the potassium hydroxide is not strong enough to make a solid soap. It is only used for making the liquid soaps in today’s world.

Soap manufacturers today do everything they possibly can to hide the fact that they use lye in their soap. They have made up lots of names to hide it. Dr. Bronners soap, which many naturalists are in love with as a natural soap, uses lye. They hide the fact in their ingredients list by saying that they use “saponified oils”, which is the process of mixing lye with oil. The public is afraid of the word lye, but they have no idea that it is used in every bar soap ever made. Soap simply cannot be made without it.

The important thing in any soap recipe is using the proper proportion of lye and oil to form a PH neutral soap when completed. In times of old, soap makers were not using a pure form of lye in their recipes. The PH of the lye was not consistent, so their end product could end up being very alkaline, and burn the skin. The story of “lye soap” burning the skin has been passed through the generations, creating public fear of the word. When properly used, lye is our friend. Lye (sodium hydroxide in this case), when mixed in the proper proportions with hydrochloric acid, produces a strong chemical reaction resulting in table salt, something we have been eating for hundreds of years.

The recipe below uses the proper proportions of oil and lye to create a PH balanced soap that will be very mild to the skin.

Here are a few tools you will need:

A digital scale capable of 5 lbs measurement.
2 glass bulb thermometers that can measure up to 200° Fahrenheit.
A stick blender.
A high temperature plastic jar (to mix the sodium hydroxide and water).
A long-handled plastic mixing spoon.
A ladle.
Two large plastic bowls.
Soap molds.

Here is the recipe:

All measurements are in weight – not fluid ounces.
All bars are assumed to be 4oz.

Full Batch	Half Batch	Quarter Batch
Makes 28 bars	Makes 14 bars	Makes 7 bars
24oz Cold Distilled Water	12oz Cold Distilled Water	6oz Cold Distilled Water
12oz Sodium Hydroxide (lye)	6oz Sodium Hydroxide (lye)	3oz Sodium Hydroxide (lye)
74oz Olive Oil	37oz Olive Oil	18.5oz Olive Oil
14oz Coconut Oil	7oz Coconut Oil	3.5oz Coconut

Caution: Whenever working with Sodium Hydroxide it is recommended as a safety precaution that you use rubber gloves, goggles, and any other protective gear that you may want to use in order to protect your skin or clothing from accidental splashes of the liquid.

Add lye to water in a high temperature plastic container outside of house. Do not breathe fumes. Always add Lye to water (not reverse). Caution: Temperature of mixture will rise to approximately 195ºF. Stir mixture with plastic spoon.
Mix oils and microwave to 110ºF.
Allow lye to cool (place in bowl of cold water to speed up cooling).
When both solutions are at 110ºF, add lye solution to the oil mixture. Blend with stick blender until the mixture reaches “trace” where you can see a film on top of the soap that traces the line of the stick blender. Ladle into molds.
Handle bars with care for next two days. PH will be high and can burn the skin for the first 48 hrs. The PH will settle to neutral after this.
Place molds in freezer for 30 minutes to help separate the soap from the molds.
Allow 6-8 weeks to air dry before use.

Distilled water is used to guarantee that the PH of the soap will be neutral when complete, and that no impurities are in the water that could affect the saponification process. Distilled water can be purchased at any shopping center in a one gallon container.

Lye (Sodium Hydroxide) can be purchased locally at any Lowes home center, and now Tractor Supply carries it too. A two-pound container of Roebic Crystal Drain Cleaner is available for just over $12. Make sure you buy the one that says 100% lye. Or, you can purchase it in bulk HERE. Two pounds are plenty to last more than two full batches.

Please note that sodium hydroxide is considered a hazardous substance, and shipping prices increase significantly because of this. It is also used in manufacturing certain illegal drugs, and some states may regulate the sale of lye for this reason.

Soap molds can be purchased HERE or at many other internet soap supply retailer.

How to make your own Castile Soap like Dr. Bronners from Frugalberry.com on Vimeo.

I now have an article posted on how to use this bar soap to make your own liquid castile soap. Check it out HERE.

Category Household | Tags: castile,dr bronners,home made,how to,make your own,soap | 127 Comments

How to tune your own piano

February 8, 2012 by Karl

In today’s economy, cutting spending is a must. One place to do this is by tuning your own piano. This post will show you, step by step, exactly how to tune your piano in a very easy way. You will need to buy a few tools, but the total cost of the tools should be less than what a piano tuner would charge (assuming you have your own laptop). Once you have the tools and the knowledge, you will be saving every time the piano needs to be tuned.

Most pianos have a full 88 keys, which is 7 ⅓ octaves. It is very rare that the lower 5 and upper 5 keys are used. They still need to be tuned, though if they’re not perfect no one is going to notice.

Here is the basic keyboard layout:

Each octave has 7 white keys and 5 black keys. The different octaves are labeled 0-7.

You will need 3 basic tools in order to tune your piano. A tuning ‘hammer‘ (which is really a wrench), some little rubber wedges called ‘mutes‘, and a windows based laptop with a built-in microphone. If you don’t have a microphone in your laptop, you can plug-in an external microphone. On the laptop you need to download and install AP Tuner. This is the software that you will use to tune each of the notes. It is free to use, but if you are happy with the software, I encourage you to pay the $35 US to help support the person who wrote this awesome application.

The video at the bottom of this page will show you each step in how to tune the piano.

If you have an old piano, like mine, you may find that the tuning pins are very loose, and won’t hold the strings in tune. If this is the case, you can go to my post on replacing tuning pins to see how that is done.

In general, you want to start tuning in one spot and work your way up or down the keyboard, one note at a time. Some tuners start in the middle and work up, then return to the middle and work their way down. There doesn’t seem to be a perfect way to do it, but you want to make sure that all the strings are properly adjusted when you are done.

If your piano is significantly out of tune when you start, you may want to take it up in half pitch steps (half a note at a time) a day or a week apart so you don’t break any strings. Old strings can be brittle, and break if they are overstressed.

On the lower end of the keyboard each note has only one string that is struck by the hammer. As you move up the keyboard, it shifts to two strings per note, and then three strings per note. Where there are two or three strings per note, you need to get all the strings in unison with each other (the exact same pitch), and you need to make sure that it is playing the proper pitch.

The video below will explain it in detail, but the basic method to achieve this is to mute out all but one string on an individual note, and then use a device that will listen to that string to determine if it is the proper pitch. In our case we will be using some software in your laptop. Adjustments are made to this string as needed, and then any remaining one or two strings are adjusted to match the first. Then the process is repeated for each note on the piano.

As each string is raised to pitch, more and more tension is placed on the sounding board of the piano. The combined tension of these strings is somewhere between 15 and 20 tons. That’s 30,000 to 40,000 pounds of combined tension on the sounding board. When you raise the pitch of each string, you are increasing this tension on the sounding board. What you may find when you finish tuning the piano, is that if you go back to the original strings that you tuned, they will be slightly flat from where they were when you tuned them at the beginning. This is somewhat normal because of the tensions involved, and how that tension plays out across the entire sounding board as the strings are tightened in succession. If it is noticeable, you may want to bring them back in tune. If you’re happy with the sound, don’t worry about it. It is next to impossible to get them all perfect.

Here is my video on how to tune the piano:

How to tune your own piano from karlboer on Vimeo.

A piano should stay in tune for about a year. If not, then your piano may need some maintenance. Keep in mind that pianos need a constant humidity. If the humidity in your home changes a lot between summer and winter, that is going to be a long term problem for your piano. Even if it is staying in tune now, it could start to develop problems down the road if the humidity is constantly changing in your house.

If you have found the above information helpful, please comment below. Don’t forget to tell your friends about frugalberry.com. Facebook links can be found at the top of this post.

I selected this post to be featured on my blog’s page at Money Saving Blogs.

Category Household | Tags: how to,laptop,piano tuning,tune piano | 21 Comments