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What's the silicate of soda for?

That's what I've been using but the last time I bought one it was twelve or fourteen dollars . This may be my last time though, because it's not significantly cheaper than the LouAnna double pack from Walmart . Plus the smaller containers are MUCH easier to use

Life is too short to mess with overly-accelerating FOs.

Wow!

Lye destroys almost everything, or at the very least changes it completely. You've got to get past this idea that ANYTHING - even the base oils themselves - is going to be the same after it's exposed to the lye. That's how you go from skin-nourishing coconut oil to harsh, stripping sodium...

Lots of us have done at least one, but not many oils are really suitable for a single oil soap, IMO. High oleic soaps like olive, or HO safflower can be used to make Castille soaps but they need to age a year to be decent. 100% lard is okay, but it doesn't bubble much. 100% coconut is often...

Arrows, spears, clubs... ;)

Better, but still too much castor. ;)

Soft soap is relatively easy. All you would need would be a recipe that used KOH instead of NaOH as its lye basis. The struggle would be making something that is both effective as a cleaner for really dirty, greasy hands but also not too harsh. I think I would tend toward a balanced recipe...

Abso-fricking-lutely! Most natural dies don't survive lye to any degree and saffron is WAY to precious to experiment with. If you want natural yellow, use tumeric.

IMO, don't overuse castor just because it was cheap and you want to "use it up." Why make something non-optimal? Cheap also means that it's no great loss if you don't use it all up before it goes rancid.

Lard? Lard, you say? :D Heck yeah! Lard is spectacular in soap. I assumed that you were trying to make a vegan soap with the choices you listed. It's a hard oil for soaping, so use it to replace some of the shea/cocoa.

Metallic aluminum is a no-no with lye, but aluminum oxide is probably fine. Pumice is going to be composed of aluminosillicates and oxides along with other stuff. Never used it myself, though, so don't take this as affirmative advice.

1) You really DO need to be making a minimum of 500 g total to minimize the effects of the imprecision of your scale. For the 250 g batches you've been making the difference between 5% and 0% superfat is about a gram of NaOH. With most kitchen scales having a 1 g precision, even a 500 g batch...

It's possible that the gluconate is a better nucleation site for soap crystals? How does the size of the gluconate compare with the citrate?

Seawater is hard, really hard. Ten or twenty times harder than typical fresh water - most especially the magnesium component of hardness. It's hard enough that it will actually weigh five or six grams/liter more than pure water. Those salts are going to be dispersed in your soap so that even...

Indiana in the late 70's through the 80's peanut butter and honey sandwiches were THE side served with chili at school. Every time.

Indiana's Buckeye's is flat wrong. That's Ohio, as in Ohio State Buckeyes mascot. Indiana should have been pork tenderloin.

Go get some acetate and stick it on the sides of the beveler to reduce the cut. Something like this. Add a piece to BOTH sides at the same time until the cut is the depth you want. You can try it with paper first to see how much thickness you'll ultimately need.

I can always smell lard, too, and can't tolerate it above about 25% no matter the FO trying to cover it up.