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I've done it, I prefer KOH. Compared to canned goo it's pretty good though. To me, soaps which contain any NaOH feels "grittier" although that's not quite the right term either. I've yet to hear a good reason for me to use NaOH so I use 100% KOH. It's definitely hard enough to make pucks. :)

I was doing some drywall in the basement and had just put fresh mud down on the window sill. I went upstairs to get a bee .. um, soda, and when I came back there was a paw print in it. Just one. I left it there and painted over it. Sort of his addition to the house.

Putting things in the microwave is brilliant - and I never would have thought of it till this past vacation. The area was flooding and ants were all over. We took the knobs off the oven and unplugged the microwave and stored everything in those.

Okay I'll be the guy that says it. This is just wrong. Can you make a M&P that's 100% cocoa butter? You can with CP. This is past wrong, it's false advertising and most of the people here I know try to stay away from these claims. When you make them you make your soap a drug - do you...

That's not a failure, you've just not thought of a catchy name to describe it. :)

I don't think you sound greedy either, and your concerns are very valid. The wold just sucks sometimes though and you have to be prepared to wait for karma to make things right.

I appreciate your observations. The challenge is, I think, a design that is mechanically sound yet provides features soapmakers want. Anyone can make a plain box. I want to make something people don't supply. Done well, a mold like that with dados (the grooves are called dados) could be...

If you leave, she has the whole market - this is competition. Either be in it for the long haul or be ready to leave any time competition shows up. I know which choice I'd rather you take if it was me in the stall across the way. I mean I get your predicament, but this is the real world. Not...

That's generally an indication that you need a little more water in the lather - it will hold quite a lot. I shave with a straight and I judge the lather by how it runs off the blade when rinsed - you could probably do the same with a butter knife. If it flies right off when run under warm...

It's not the look but the decision that led up to it. Any other such item that brings to bear a question of a person's ability/potential could be inserted here. An MBA who had "BMA" on his resume is one I can remember. A guy applying for a job as a server administrator giving an AOL.com email...

I did not. I thought that bringing him in to let him know in no uncertain terms why he was not getting the job would open me up to a legal issue. At the time we got 100's of resumes for every open position. I generally only interviewed 3-4 of them.

I was with you until this last part. I have a span of control that's pretty wide (corporate speak for there's a lot of people who report up to me). While I have a tattoo myself, and I do not necessarily discriminate against people with ink, if a kid came in here looking for a job with a...

Same as with my regular soap so far.

All good tips - I also think people should also know how to do this manually. Don't run away scared - it's very easy! I'll give a simple example: Here's a 1# recipe for a straight Palm Oil soap: 1 lb Palm Oil 2.16 oz Lye 4.38 oz water Now I think this would make a rock-hard bar of...

THAT would be cool. Glass + soap = no bueno.

I only lose 3-4% moisture in a cook. I can see where in a smaller batch you might lose more and have that issue. My 100g test batches were done in sealed food storage containers.

My smaller batches were definitely more difficult to manage. I don't think you did anything wrong. The reason the larger batches are like "mashed potatoes" is because there's enough heat to create steam and enough volume to capture it. That's why I make the bread dough analogy because that's...

If you mean make a 60% Sodium Lactate solution - yes. The math is nearly the same as I've showed above. If stoichiometry tells us that .81 parts of Lactic Acid combined with .35 parts of Lye gives us 1 part of Sodium Lactate, you would take the purity divided by the ratio to give you the new...

Perfect, thank you. I don't know that I've had or would have issues with the square bottom, it was just something that I got in my head.