How to Make Lye

[Carol]

How to Make Lye

Lye, also known as NaOH, sodium hydroxide, or caustic soda, is used in making soap, and also in biodiesel fuel production. You could easily buy lye from a chemical supply house or online, but you may find great satisfaction in doing it all yourself, not to mention the money you will save.


Steps

1 Start a rain barrel to catch soft water. This is a key step. Depending upon how much lye you want to leach, make sure that you have 2 or 3 gallons of soft water before you proceed.

2 Find a local brewer's supply house and pick up a wooden barrel and a cork about 3" long. You can use a cask-sized or waist-high barrel.

3 Take the barrel home and drill a hole in it approx. 2" above the bottom. Make sure that the cork will fit snugly into the hole.

4 Find a place that the barrel will be undisturbed. Lye is caustic. Take the necessary precautions. Put some bricks down and place the barrel on top of them. The brick base must be stable. It raises the barrel up so that you can easily drain off the lye into a container when it is ready. Give yourself room to work.

5 Cover the bottom of the barrel with some palm-sized clean rocks (e.g. river rock). Cover the rocks with approximately 6" of straw (this can be hay or grass).
This will filter the ashes and help your lye drain cleanly.

6 Gather branches and/or logs of oak, ash, or fruitwoods. Remember that the best lye is made from hardwoods. Avoid pine, fir, and other evergreens.

7 Burn it outside in a pile, or better yet, use it in your fireplace or woodstove.

8 Scoop the ashes out and put them in the prepped barrel. (Make sure that the ash is completely cold, or you'll set your barrel and anything around it on fire.) You can fill the barrel with ash but it is not necessary you can make smaller amounts with less ash.

9 Put a pan under the hole and remove the cork. Pour the soft water in until you see it start to drain into the pan, then put the cork back in tight. The water level should be about 6" from the top. After a day, the first ash should settle and you can add more ash.

10 Let it sit for at least 3 days. You can add ash all week and drain it regularly on a specific day of the week.

11 Check to see if your lye is ready. For what purpose are you leaching this lye? Body soap or heavy cleaning? Lye concentration gets stronger with each leaching. For average soap making, you can use these measures: Drop a fist-sized potato or a raw egg into the barrel. If it floats enough for a quarter-size piece to rise above the water, it is ready. If it doesn't, you need to add more ashes or drain all the water and re-leach it (pour it back into the cask and let it set one more cycle).

12 Make sure that you have a wooden crock or glass container to catch your lye when it's ready. Put it under the tap, gently pull the cork, and fill your containers. Leave enough head room that they will be safe and easy to pour. Make sure that you have tight fitting lids.

13 Store your lye in a cool dark place until use. (The sooner the better.)


Tips

• Do not start this project until you have collected 2-3 gallons of rain water and have purchased or scavenged all of your supplies.

• Make sure that your lye barrel has a stable foundation and is in a secure place where it cannot be knocked over by, for example, roving children.

• If you run a dehumidifier its collected water is an alternative to rainwater.

• To dispose of old leached ashes, dig a hole away from everything and pour the muck into it. Don't cover it until the ashes dry thoroughly.


Warnings

• Lye is a base, also known as an alkali. Both acids and bases are caustic; they "burn" anything that they touch. Please use common sense and follow the tips provided.

• Wear rubber gloves and eye protection when draining off or handling your lye, it can burn your skin and blind you!

• For all backyard chemists, chemical-resistant gloves (the yellow kitchen ones will do), safety glasses and arm and body covering are mandatory.

• Educate yourself on poison treatment before you begin making soap or biodiesel. visit www.poison.org [1] for appropriate actions to take if lyewater or lye crystals spill on you, are accidentally swallowed, or get in your eye.

• In the instance that lye should come in contact with your skin, brush off any solids and do not run it under water. Neutralize the burn with vinegar. Water will only make it hurt worse. The strong base can cause severe burns, and you may not feel the effects right away due to nerve damage. So always (see next dot)

• In any emergency, call 911 or your local poison control center's emergency number.

[Carol]

Making lye from wood ash

Lye made from wood ash is potassium hydroxide, not sodium hydroxide -- there's 10 times as much potassium as sodium in wood ash.

The process makes lye water. If you boiled off all the water you could use it as the catalyst to make biodiesel, but you'd need more accurate pH measures than those listed below. The usual pH meter or litmus papers would do. See also Natural test papers.

If you try this, we'd be very interested to know the results -- please contact us.

Making the lye

Drill a lot of holes in the bottom of a small wooden barrel, make sure it's waterproof before you drill the holes!

Stand the barrel on blocks leaving space beneath the barrel for a container. Use a waterproof wood or glass container. Lye can burn through some metals.

Put a layer of gravel in the bottom of the barrel over the holes, then put a layer of straw over the gravel. Fill the rest of the barrel with hardwood ash (NOTE: hardwood -- NOT softwood), leaving a couple of inches at the top clear. Then pour rainwater into the barrel. After a long time the water in the barrel will start to drip into the container. Leave it until it stops, then replace the container with another in case of odd drips.

Use an old iron pot, or a steel pan (One you will not be using for anything else!). Boil the liquid until it is so concentrated that a fresh egg (still in it's shell please!) will float on top. Then destroy the egg. Remember to take all precautions not the let the liquid touch your skin or clothing.

To test the strength of the lye you need a saturated solution of salt. Dissolve chemical-free salt in a pint of water until no more salt will dissolve. Take a stick and put a small weight on the end of it and float it in a pint of the salty water. The weight will sink to the bottom, while the top of the stick will float. Make a mark on the stick where it reaches the water line. Then float the stick and weight in a pint of lye. The mark on the stick will probably be above the water mark of the lye. If so, stir in some more rainwater until the mark on the stick is in exactly the same place it was in the salt water. You now have the correct distillation of lye for making soap.

From "How to Make: SOAP"
http://www.oldcity.demon.co.uk/shez/m_make.html#make2

Making "Lye Water"

Soap making uses a caustic solution known as "Lye Water".

When available, Caustic Soda is used. Here we will make Lye Water out of certain wood ashes and "soft water".

1) White Ashes

Dried palm branches, dried out banana peels, cocoa pods, kapok tree wood, oak wood, (or for really white soap, apple tree wood) make the best lye ashes. Ordinary wood used in cooking fires will do.

Whatever wood is used, it should be burned in a very hot fire to make very white ashes.

When cold, these are stored in a covered plastic bucket or wooden barrel, or stainless steel container. If these are not available, a clay pot-jar which has been fired in a pottery making kiln (not just dried in the sun).

A wooden drum or barrel which has a tap at the right is best.

2) Soft Water

Water from a spring or from showers of rain is called "soft water", because it does not have metallic or acidic chemicals in it.

This makes it useful for soap making, as there are no other chemicals in it which would get in the way of making soap.

"Ordinary" bore, well, or river water can be used for making soap, but this will sometimes need to have a "washing soda" or "baking soda" added to it. Otherwise some of the chemicals in the water will get in the way of making the soap.

If you are using "ordinary" water and you want to test it to see if some soda needs to be added, simply try to make soap bubble up (foam) in it.

If the soap easily foams up, the water is probably ok as it is.

If not, try adding a little bit of soda at a time stirring it to make it disappear, until the water will foam the soap up.

Then add the same amount of soda to the same amounts of the water that you wish to use to make the soap. For example, if you were testing a 1/4 (a quarter) of a bucket of water, and you ended up needing 1/8 (an eighth) of a cup of soda, then you would need 4/8 ( or 1/2-half) a cup of soda for a full bucket of "ordinary" water.

However you have got it, store the "soft water" in covered wooden, plastic, or stainless steel buckets or containers. (Again, a clay-jar as described above can be used if needed.)

"Safe" Containers

Any of the types of containers, buckets, barrels or jars described in the White Ashes or Soft Water sections are called "safe containers".

Making "Lye Water"

If you are going to use a large barrel or drum to make the lye water in, and it has a tap or hole at the right, place some kind of filter on the inside of the barrel around the opening.

Fill the barrel with white ashes to about four inches (10 cm or 0.1 metre) below the top.

Boil half (1/2) a bucket full of soft water (about 10 pints or six litres), and pour over the ashes.

Slowly add more cold soft water until liquid drips out of the barrel. Close the tap or block the hole.

Add more ashes to top the barrel up again, and more soft water. Do not add so much water that the ashes swim.

Leave to stand for four or more hours (or overnight if you have the time). Later pour the brownish lye water into a plastic or other "safe" container(s). Then pour back through the ashes again. Let the lye water drip into "safe" containers.

When the brown lye water stops coming out of the barrel, or ash container, then pour four to five pints (2-1/2 to three litre) of soft water through the ashes, collecting the lye which comes out in a separate "safe" container (as this lye may be weaker than the first lot).

Repeat this using two to three pints (one to two litres) of soft water, until no more brown liquid comes out of the ashes.

Either put the lye into "safe" bottles, or cover the "safe" containers which it is in. Dig the ashes into the vegetable garden.

Lye Water Strength

If an egg or potato will float just below halfway, or a chicken feather starts to dissolve in it, then the lye water is at the right strength.

If the egg will not float, then the lye water could be boiled down if you want it to be stronger.

If the egg seems to pop up too far, add a little bit of soft water (a cup at a time) stirring the lye water, until the egg floats so that its head pops up.

From Soap Making - Traditional Methods: Lye Rain Water Wood Ash
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/
paul_norman_3/SOAPMAKE.HTM

Make The Lye

In making soap the first ingredient required was a liquid solution of potash commonly called lye.

The lye solution was obtained by placing wood ashes in a bottomless barrel set on a stone slab with a groove and a lip carved in it. The stone in turn rested on a pile of rocks. To prevent the ashes from getting in the solution a layer of straw and small sticks was placed in the barrel then the ashes were put on top. The lye was produced by slowly pouring water over the ashes until a brownish liquid oozed out the bottom of the barrel. This solution of potash lye was collected by allowing it to flow into the groove around the stone slab and drip down into a clay vessel at the lip of the groove.

Some colonists used an ash hopper for the making of lye instead of the barrel method. The ash hopper, was kept in a shed to protect the ashes from being leached unintentionally by a rain fall. Ashes were added periodically and water was poured over at intervals to insure a continuous supply of lye. The lye dripped into a collecting vessel located beneath the hopper.

The hardest part was in determining if the lye was of the correct strength, as we have said. In order to learn this, the soap maker floated either a potato or an egg in the lye. If the object floated with a specified amount of its surface above the lye solution, the lye was declared fit for soap making. Most of the colonists felt that lye of the correct strength would float a potato or an egg with an area the size of a ninepence (about the size of a modern quarter) above the surface. To make a weak lye stronger, the solution could either be boiled down more or the lye solution could be poured through a new batch of ashes. To make a solution weaker, water was added.

From Colonial Soap Making: Its History and Techniques -- The Soap Factory
http://www.alcasoft.com/soapfact/history.html

"When a fresh egg floats with a nickel-sized to quarter-sized area above the surface, the liquor is ready for soap making." -- Homestead mailing list.
Nickel = 2 cm diameter
Quarter = 2.5 cm diameter

At the turn of the last century lye was obtained by leaching water through wood ashes. At best, the concentration of potassium hydroxide in the resulting lye water was always questionable. My grandmother said that she could tell if the lye water was the right strength by using the wing feather pulled from her favorite goose. She would pour the lye water into a 30 gallon cooking pot and heat the solution. Next she would touch the feather to the heating lye. If the feather dissolved, the lye was strong enough to dissolve pig fat.
-- Soap Making Today

[whitecrow]

This is the way lye was made for hundreds of years. The chemical produced is KOH or potassium hydroxide, and not NaOH or sodium hydroxide. Both are casually referred to as lye or more accurately, caustic soda.

KOH does not make hard soap. In the old days, salt was added to harden the soap into bars (Pliny the Elder wrote about this), or else the soap gel was kept in a barrel and ladled out as needed. In the 1830s a Frenchman (sorry, I forget his name) invented a process for extracting sodium hydroxide from brine, and for the first time a real soap industry was born. By the 1850s, commercial bars were cheap enough for most homes. However, the Civil War inflicted such deep economic harm that many Southern women made their own soap well into the 1940s.

Lye is used in many industrial processes. Turns out it's also used by meth labs...I used to wonder why it was disappearing off store shelves. I found out when I bought 12 pounds one day. Now I introduce myself and even bring soap samples if they don't know me.

Lye was the secret ingredient that
allowed corn to sustain native americans for generations.

Soaking the corn in wood ash water makes tryptophan available for absorption by the body. Poor southern farmers did not know this and suffered pellegra as a result.
This is one of the causes for their nickname, rednecks.

There were severe penalties for the racisim against native
americans. It blinded european settlers to the wisdom that was offered.

[Shellie]

Are you sure they were using lye and not lime???

Originally Posted by Shellie

Are you sure they were using lye and not lime???

positive. They soaked their corn in wood ash water.

[ucan]

Thanks for the post Carol - I've never heard this anywhere before and it sounds remarkably simple. I'll have to try this at some point.

[WiNaDeYo]

Yes!!!
My grandmother used to make make lye soap and prepare "homony" (that's what dried corn soaked in lye water is called) at the same time, usually in the winter when they would slaughter the pigs (using the pig's fat, hoofs, ears, bones, whatever) for the soap.
Homony has to be rinsed really well 3-4 times before cooking and eating it. I sure did love it! I've got how to make it written down somewhere around here...I'll have to look.
Years ago you could still buy it in cans at the grocery store (NC, USA).

Have you all never eaten corn nuts? It's fried homony!

Originally Posted by WiNaDeYo

Yes!!!
My grandmother used to make make lye soap and prepare "homony" (that's what dried corn soaked in lye water is called)

PLEASE share your grandmother's recipe with us...pleez?

[WiNaDeYo]

OK... here goes, but first of all I'd like to explain that my grandmother was born in 1897 in Rutherfordton, NC. Her grandmother was Cherokee and married a 3rd generation American of German discent. My gra'ma was raised on "the farm" but spent most of her life raising 13 children and working in the cotton textile mills. She was sooo wise and I miss her so much. She died in 1992. Such a smart lady... I have always loved her stories and dreamed of living on a farm like she did.

So.... they always made homony (or is it hominy??) when they made soap. They'd set up an iron pot on a fire next to the lye brew. They'd take out some of the lye solution and dilute it (sorry, the audio recording I have of my gra'ma telling this says that her "mama knew how much springwater to put"). While that was warming, gra'ma would go to the corn crib and choose the ears with the biggest grains on them and would shell the corn off the cobs. They'd fill the pot about half full of corn grains. They'd get the pot a'boilin' keeping the fire hot under the pot and "boil it a little while" and the grains would swell. When the skins of the grains would peel off then it was ready to be washed. They'd take the pot to the "branch" (stream) and wash it several times to get the skins off the grains and to remove the lye. After washing out the pot real good, they'd put the homony back in and cook it until it was tender. Sometimes the corn would swell up so much it'd run over and they'd have to take part out. They'd change the water several times while it was cooking by draining some off and putting fresh water in. The best type of corn, according to my gra'ma, for homony was "Hickory King" corn...big old flat grains... a white sweet corn...better than field corn."

I'd love to try this....

did she mention anything about ash water or lye water being used, and if so how was it used. This is important because the lye water
activates niacin in the corn to make it bioavailable.

This I have documented, but I have not found the specific procedure
other than mention of boiling in ash water.

[WiNaDeYo]

Yes, Gra’ma explains how they made lye soap on the tape I have…

They’d make a wooden troth using a hollow log, about 3 feet long. It had to be propped up on one end and a board had to be nailed into the bottom leaving space for the lye to flow out into a crock pot positioned underneath at the lower end. They’d fill the troth up about two thirds with green oak or hickory ashes and slowly add water. This process of adding water took all day. “Just keep a’putting water in that and let it soak down. It’d take…a day to get it good and wet…your ashes would get plum wet.” They’d keep adding water until they had accumulated about two gallons of the lye solution. This liquid was then put into a pot and they’d add grease to it (“old grease that had been saved all year in a jar for this purpose, old meat and skins, pork fat and some bones, whatever”). Then they’d build a fire around the pot to bring it to a slow boil: “not a too big a fire or it’d just roll everywhere. It’d all come out.” They would keep soap boiling for about three days. Her mama could tell when it was done, when it got thick. They’d then dip it out while it was hot and keep it in earthen jars. The “dregs” (bones, etc.) would be in the bottom but above would be just “clear soap, kinda yellow creamlike”. Leaving the “dregs”, they’d start up another pot. Pouring spring water on the ashes to make the lye. They’d make enough soap to last a year.

Gra’ma warned, though…
“..if you got too much lye in it (the soap), it’d eat your fingernails off. If you washed and put your hands in that soap, it’d just make your fingernails curl up. And so you had to be careful about that.”

I am sorry that I don’t know the amount of ingredients here…even my gra’ma didn’t know. Her mother didn’t tell her. She just used her intuition, I suppose. Throughout the audio cassette recording, Gra’ma keeps saying, “Now, that wasn’t my job, but mama knew...and she didn’t tell me…”

And, yes, the lye extracted was used to make the homony, too. Can’t tell you how much was diluted in the water though. Sorry…

[WiNaDeYo]

Googling, I found numerous sites that mention making hominy.

Here are a few with explanations similar to mine:

http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/13796/118399

http://www.mtnlaurel.com/Recipes/hominy.htm

http://recipes.chef2chef.net/recipe-...7/147819.shtml

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/2653103.html

[whitecrow]

Originally Posted by WiNaDeYo

Gra’ma warned, though…
“..if you got too much lye in it (the soap), it’d eat your fingernails off. If you washed and put your hands in that soap, it’d just make your fingernails curl up. And so you had to be careful about that.”

Therein lies the disadvantage of making lye the old-fashioned way. It's more art than science. The old way of knowing when your lye solution was strong enough was to float an egg in it. And this process creates potassium hydroxide, which does not make hard soap. For that you need sodium hydroxide.

In the old days, lye-makers were called ashers because of the process used. The wooden rigs used to percolate the ashes were called ashies. When the lye water was heat-dried to a powder it was called potash. And when kiln-dried into granules it was called pearlash. All that came to an end when the process for making sodium hydroxide from brine was invented. It was this invention that allowed soapmaking to make the leap from a cottage industry to a true industrial process.

Old-fashioned lye soap was often harsh because there was no way to measure the strength of the lye accurately, hence no way to know for sure what percentage of the fats and oils were saponified. Frequently they were completely saponified with lye left over, which is what made the stuff burn.

Today we can make soap with a controlled lye discount - which would have been impossible with home-made lye. On the other hand, in a survival situation it would be good to know how to make this most useful chemical.

[WiNaDeYo]

Lye is caustic acid, right? What other uses would it have in a survival situation?
(I'm lazy tonight and don't want to do my homework alone...)

[whitecrow]

Originally Posted by WiNaDeYo

Lye is caustic acid, right? What other uses would it have in a survival situation?
(I'm lazy tonight and don't want to do my homework alone...)

Lye is caustic soda. It is a strong alkali, and not an acid. It is useful for making soap, curing certain foods such as olives, and many industrial processes...including, so I'm told, making meth which is why it's getting hard to walk into a store and buy pure lye anymore.

Lowe's sells a brand called Roebic in the plumbing department. It is 100% sodium hydroxide. The main producer of lye is Dow Chemical. I'm sure Roebic buys it by the boxcar and puts it in those little jars at a huge profit. I'm currently looking into whether it is possible to buy pure sodium hydroxide from a manufacturer less into corporate rape of the planet and everyone on it.