A little change made to Fels Naptha

[teknikleespekng]

Lye Soap

Oh, thanks for the tip! My grandmother used to make her own lye soap. I remember it sitting up on the beams in the basement. Kinda harsh when we took baths there though! Any particular brand, place where I should start looking? The old time hardware stores are mostly gone, and I dont purchase over the internet. Im going to go google now. Sometimes I still find stuff through Vermont Country Store.

Lisa

 

[westingman123]

Lye soap

My local Ace Hardware stores carry it, but it's made here in Missouri so I'm unsure if it's available everywhere.

 

[stan]

Lisa

It may be hard to get a hold of since you don't order over the net.
But you may find a website that has a phone # that allows phone orders for a handcrafted version.

There is some misconception about Lye Soap with regards to it being harsh. That's really not the case at all.
Lye soap (which really means soap made with pig fat) can be very conditioning to skin, because of its unique fatty acid content.

However Lye Soap that is made with the intent to clean floors, or used for laundry, can be made slightly lye heavy.
This is the case in years gone by, and in many vintage laundry formulas.

There was Lye Soap for bathing, ( less lye required for same amount of fat) and stronger Lye Soap
( a little more lye than nessesary for the exact same amout of fat)

So the fat heavy one was used to wash the baby, and the lye heavy one used to wash the baby's diapers! LOL
There is a lot more science and chemistry involved than that, but ya get the idea!

 

[teknikleespekng]

stan

I believe the soap she made was more for laundry than bathing. She had ivory soap in the bathroom, but I guess my brother and I were so enthralled w/the homemade soap we wanted to use it. I know she had a top loader but she also had a washboard and wringer.

 

[stan]

Im guessing but The washboard

Is most likely what she used her lye soap for, and as a stain stick.
The home made lye soap doesn't produce a whole lot of suds, which make it easier to use with a washboard, or as stain stick, so she could see what had come clean, and what hadn't, and re visit the dirty spots!
Without a whole lot of suds, shed be able to see the color of the water, and decide if it was time to dump, and refill.

It was the original low sudsing wash aid. LOL

 

[launderess]

IIRC Lye Is Used To Produce "Crystal Meth"

Thus in many local areas of this country sales are restricted. If you can find a shop that carries lye in our area it is either behind counters and or locked cabinets. Even crystal drain openers/cleaners can be hard to lay hands on as well.

Even before its other uses lye was becoming hard to find in many areas. The stuff is just too dangerous to have lying about household, especially one with children.

Growing up remember reading cans of lye either in shops or in someone's home and seeing directions for making soap. Of course then one wondered why anyone would bother making something that can easily be purchased in shops...

Sodium hydroxide/caustic soda (lye) for many years was part of commercial and even home laundering processes. Often used as a "break" this powerful base chemical would be employed to raise the pH level of water to increase it's detergency action by "breaking" oils/soils from fabrics. In short the alkali turned the oils/fats on washing into a type of soap that could be washed away.

Base chemicals also will destroy protein which in the days before enzyme enhanced laundry products everything from ammonia on up the pH scale was used to deal with blood and similar nature stains. Alkali will also help break up tannin and some other types of stains as well.

Base chemicals also contribute to washday because by raising the pH level of water it counters the normally acid laundry thus allowing soap to work better. It also caused natural textile fibers to swell allowing dirt/soils to be easily washed away.

Problem with using strong or even medium basic chemicals like caustic soda, sal soda, sodium carbonate, etc... is that washing has to be rinsed several times and then soured to bring down the final pH to a level that won't irritate human skin. Repeated each wash this causes all sorts of problems for textiles and little by little chews fibers leading to weakening and holes. Encrustation is something any good launderer or those formulating detergents know well. This is why you hear so much about near or neutral laundry products today.

P&G's latest incarnation of Tide (Vivid) claims to give excellent results whilst avoiding encrustation and the chewing up of textile fibers caused by using harsh base chemicals.

Commercial laundries long have used corrosive substances (caustic soda, washing soda, chlorine bleaches, etc...) which is how they can run several "fast" cycles and produce acceptable clean washing. This often was not a problem in the "old days", but with modern local sewage codes laundries often are hit with fines for what amounts to chemical dumping.

 

[stan]

Laundress

Your right!

However here in these parts, there are too many people that are still curing their own olives, so the stuff still sits on the hardware store shelves!

Would love to see what the directions were for soap-making on those old cans you saw! Who knows how they calculated the formula!

The reason one would make there own would be... to control of the quality of the soap desired.
In other words, if they had some idea, of fatty acid contents of various fats, and oils, and knew what each one contributed to the final outcome, someone could taylor the soap to there own specific needs.

To get closer to our original topic,
Say for instance I wanted to make something close to the original Fels Naptha, I might use lard, lye, and soft water, calculate to a 0% super fat (no fat remaining) and during the processing add a percentage of Naptha solvent
( I'd get that at the same hardware store)
theoretically what I'd end up with, would be a low sudsing laundry soap, enhanced by the stoddard solvent .
Would I have the same thing as commercially made vintage Fels? Of course not. I wouldn't be able to purify or "prove" the soap the same way they did.
And your right, extra rinsing may be required, but I'd get me some really clean bright whites LOL

Your also right about the sodium hydroxide being caustic, even worse is potassium hydroxide, also used to make soft, or liquid soap. Why people should be cautious with fire place ashes getting wet. AKA potassium hydroxide.

 

[launderess]

Would love to see what the directions were for soap-making o

Knock yourself out! *LOL*

 

[stan]

Dear

Should have known you'd have a can of the stuff about LOL!

Do you happen to know how many ounces the can was?
If so, think I will knock myself out a do the calculations !

 

[launderess]

IIRC It Was

Thirteen ounces in a plastic can.

Red Devil lye was discontinued several years ago, so cannot tell you much beyond that. Word is that the US federal government *leaned* on Reckitt-Benckiser to cease production but there are still other sources out there.

 

[westie2]

My grandmother and great grand mother used wood ash to make lye.  Took shifted hardwood ashes from the wood stove  and fire place and put it in a wood barrel that had a layer of rocks in bottom then a thick layer of straw abd it also had a wooden spout on it.  They would pack the barrel with the ash and then would take rain water and pour over the ash.  Would used several gallons of water and would let it sit in the barrel for a week and drain it.  To check the lye  strenght they would take a raw egg and put in the bucket holding the lye water.  If it floated to the top it was strong enough to work.  Looked like tea.  I have one of the big cast iron kettles they used my brother the other.  Only use cast iron or stainless steele.  Do it only outside as the fumes can't get you.

 

I don't know the measurments as they would put in the lard and tallow and heat and also would heat the lye water then poured the lye water into the pot that had the melted fat.  They used a big wooden paddle and stired and astired the mixture until it turned and starting getting soupy thick and would stir some more until the paddle would stand in the pot.  Then would dip out the soap into boxes my grand pas and uncles had made.  They were lined with old newspaper.  That would sit for a day or so and then they woul cut it into blocks and then after a week would turn the bars outs and lay then on the covered back porch floor to cure a month or so.  Readyy for another year for family to use.  To make hand soap to clean dirt off they would take some of the soft soap and add corn meal to it then pour into making bars.  I guess the last time they made it was like 1963 or 1964 my grandmother passed away in 1965 when she was 65 and great grand mother lived on to 1977 when she was 97.  My great grand dad died in 1960 when he was 95. 

 

[stan]

Hi Charles

Thanks for sharing that story! Just goes to show how easy we have it now.
Often times recipes were passed down from mother to daughter and so on.

In the movie "The Little Foxes" Adie is putting Alexandrea on the train to fetch her father... Adie instructs her how to behave on the trip, witch includes not using any other soap except the one she had made for her!
Some old time recepies were time honnored secrets, hardly ever shared!
Even now, Soap Makers don't reveal all their secrets, especially if they have come up with a luxury formula. Ingredients are listed, but not the percentages of ingredients. Those percentages oddly enough make a world of difference in the final products performance, feel, look, smell, lather ect.

Laundress
thanks for looking, the one I use is 16 ounces, and I believe some of the old vintage metal cans held 10 ounces . So one can of lye could have easily made 5 to 6 lbs of soap, depending on the fat.
Now a days soap formulas are created with a SAP chart, and a digital scale.
The weight of the soap that is going to be made, or the batch size is decided first.
The SAP chart shows the amount of sodium hydroxide required to saponify all of a specific fat, or oil. (By weight)
Each fat that is going to be used, has to be calculated seperateley, as each fat has a different SAP value. And, I've always found this interesting, but no two fats, be they animal or vegetable are exactly alike in their fatty acid makeup

Hence my curiosity of the vintage label.

 

[kittymommy]

Fels-Naptha

I use Fels-Naptha to make my own laundry detergent. I made some yesterday, using the new formula, and I do not like it. Well, I guess I should say I do not like it for grating. The old formula grated easily, even using a fine grater. The new formula is waxy/sticky, and clogs up the grater. That consistency worries me for cleaning laundry as well, although I haven't tried it yet.

Every store I go to, I am going to root around for any bars of the old formula I can find!

 

[stan]

Hi Kitty

Don't think it's the new formula, it has to do with the moisture in the bar itself.
I've had that happen with the old formula as well.
It a matter of getting a good dry bar.
Next time you buy one, un wrap the bar and allow it to dry out. If you cut the bar in half, it takes half the time to dry it.