The oils
| Oil | As the source prints it | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Oleic Acid | Oleic acid · 1000 lb | 100.0 % |
How it is made
| Process | Semi-boiled |
| Alkali | caustic soda ley at 18° B. · 1300 lb · 18° Bé |
| Superfat | Not stated |
| Water | as the source states it |
| Iodine value | 90 |
| INS | 107 |
What the numbers say
Hardness 3 below 29–54
Cleansing 0 below 12–22
Conditioning 88 above 44–69
Bubbly lather 0 below 14–46
Creamy lather 3 below 16–48
Computed from the fatty acids of the fats above. The bands are what the craft has settled on, not chemistry — a bar outside one is not wrong.
The source
A free fatty acid, so it needs far more alkali per gram than a triglyceride and reacts on contact — Watt warns of foaming that has to be beaten down with a shovel. He tunes the endpoint by taste: caustic after two or three hours means add oil, no alkaline taste at all means add ley.
Alexander Watt, The Art of Soap-Making: A Practical Handbook of the Manufacture of Hard and Soft Soaps, Toilet Soaps, Etc., Crosby Lockwood and Co., London, 1884, p.83. The Art of Soap-Making: A Practical Handbook of the Manufacture of Hard and Soft Soaps, Toilet Soaps, Etc. · read 2026-09-22
Read from the Internet Archive OCR of the Cornell University Library copy. Page numbers are taken from OCR'd running headers and may be one out where the header digits were damaged.
Read from a scan rather than a proofread transcription, so the figures are checked against the book’s own printed total where it prints one.