Really cool video! Try adding salt to it to make it harder: In my experience of soap making salt based soap hardening worked best with a combination of 97% hardwood ash 3% pine ash mixture which are much very potassium rich where I live, so I'm sure Your pure sodium hydroxide would make it even harder since I cant really control wood ash. I just dissolve a couple pinches of salt into the water per finished liter of soap.
@@margitvarganemunkacsi9700 allowing it to "cure" for a month or so, as well as heating the soap when reacting (hot processing) helps make it harder too. Some additives, as well as different oils can make it set harder too. There are soap making websites that go into ratios and types of oils to use to make a harder soap, more bubbles, etc. Soap making is fun and easy.
vid suggestion: Na soap is normal soap, K soap is liquid soap, Li soap stops your garage door from squeaking (white lithium grease). But what secrets are Rb and Cs soap hiding? Or other cations like group 2 metals and ammonium.
I've used beeswax in soap before, usually up to 5% of the fat bill - to make it harder. Though making the soap harder is not a problem, coconut oil gives a really hard soap too if used by itself (and also has much better cleaning properties). In a regular soap bill, beeswax will saponify slower than the other fats so if you use a regular "superfat" of 5%, a lot of that will be comprised of leftover beeswax. Unreacted beeswax in soap will give it a moisturizing effect as it will coat the skin with a thin layer of itself and delay the evaporation of water. It's also why it's used in lip balms (together with things like cocoa butter). (edit) In fact, I've just played a bit in SoapCalc with some recipes, and a soap made from 50% beeswax and 50% coconut oil will again be very hard, but also have much better cleansing properties that 100% beeswax, with all parameters except for hardness falling right in the desirable zones. Just in case you want to try this recipe instead for your "fossils", because I think it will give you overall a better soap.
Cody coming back after a month of silence with "hematite" on his hands, sporting durable new protection glasses, telling us he's gotten into soap making. Anyone else getting Fight Club vibes?
I love how we get to see all of Cody's different phases, from mineral extraction, to mashroom growing/tasting then bees, and now soap. Wish I had the same energy.
Not even evergy, just resources/space. if I owned land I'd be doing all sorts of stuff like this too tbh, but I'm trapped in a tiny apartment with no way out. :)
@@higgsbonbon Yes same here. I hope that someday I could, it is just awful to maybe wait like 30 years for homesteading/small family farm. This world has not been kind to a lot of us unfortunately 🤷♂🤷♂
@@bob2859 Exactly, and I'm pretty sure using plastic beads has already been banned in a lot of marketplaces. Using biodegradable things like walnut shells is better, but if they could just slowly dissolve completely like harder bits of soap I think that would be even better.
Interesting. KOH gives softer, more smearable soaps, maybe it would make beeswax soap closer to normal? If so, you could make totally natural potash soap from ash and beeswax
Came here to say this. If sodium makes solid soaps, and potassium makes liquid soaps, what will potassium beeswax soap look like? And since this is Cody, obviously gotta eventually make rubidium and cesium beeswax soaps.
@@kdawg3484 And lithium. Lithium tallow soap is used for bearing grease. Well, specifically the fatty acid 12-stearate is most common, they don't want the glycerol component of raw tallow. And "lithium complex" just has two or three different fatty acids. Its pretty water resistant compared to sodium though, same goes for calcium soaps.
The flakes of beeswax soap did seem to generate more foam, probably because of the bigger surface area. So the grinded up beeswax soap could maybe also be used directly as soap. Though, one might be wasting more of this soap, since the undissolved soap can be washed away.
A wax-related experiment suggestion I've had for a while: since paraffin wax is a combination of alkanes (approx. C20 to C40), would it be possible to separate a block of undyed, unscented paraffin wax into each individual different hydrocarbon component, without cracking any of those molecules? It'd be interesting to see just how accurate those measurements are, as well as test the exact physical properties of each higher alkane. The same could potentially be done for petroleum jelly as to ascertain the chemical composition of that, since I wasn't able to find anything conclusive.
Refineries do not use distillation for heavy oils and waxes because of pyrolysis they use solvent refining, crystalizing the wax out of a chilled solution. This removes most of the oil components but it is not great for a narrow target, heck I'm not even sure how well it can be tuned for isolating alkanes from cyclic compounds. (They are actually trying to remove the wax from the oil, not the oil from the wax. The wax is less in demand.) There is increased use of vacuum distillation these days to shift the crossover molecular weight a bit higher, but it isn't enough for common paraffin or microcrystalline waxes, at least not on industrial scale. You would need a rather extreme vacuum as far as distillation setups go and very careful control over both that vacuum and temperature to maintain the target separation. It may be better to find another method like very targeted crystallization conditions.(including solvent selected for the right amount of polararity to discriminate cyclic hydrocarbons)
@@Marco-nr4wy The branching actually has very minor effect on vapor pressure, it is almost all about molecular mass. Though branching structures may have larger effect on freezing/crystallization point and on reactivity and solubility.
@@mytech6779 There is an interesting technique to separate n-alkanes from hydrocarbon mixtures. Urea forms a crystal lattice with "tubes" in it these have the right size for n-alkanes to fit in them. Branched alkanes don't fit because they are to bulky for these tubes. This property allows urea to form adducts with n-alkanes which allows the extraction of them.
A few years ago I was doing the same thing! I was replicating geodes with dipping different mixtures of soap (at the time I was using glycerin) with different colour, scent and textures. I'd make balls and split them afterwards. Still have some pictures if you would be interested! Good luck with the venture :)
Heard a lot of your ideas, Cody, all incredible, but you should keep this one! “Fossils” breaking out of soap is like a 10/10 business idea, it has everything! Seeing all these different schools of knowledge come together and mix with that spark of ingenuity and creativity, just wow!
I've had the 'taste test' for leftover lye go very wrong, when there actually was some. A drop of water on the soap, a few seconds for it to rest on the surface and absorb any alkali, followed by a strip of pH paper... That's more my speed.
Seems like the beeswax will make great fossils than for your "normal" soap. I bet you can soften that beeswax slightly as well. I also think it would probably make for some extremely durable soap, something like survival soap hahaha. Great for any wasteland wanderer! Great video as always Cody!
Well, now that you've mentioned off-hand that butter can be made into soap, I think we all need to venture down that stinky rabbit hole with you as our guide.
There are thousands upon thousands of soap charts and recipes on the internet, so it should be easy to hit the desired hardness in only a couple of tries. A normal "old school hard" bar of soap (think of something you'd get in the army in the 50s) only contains a few percent of bees was soap. The rest is lard, coconut and olive oil.
I got into soapmaking as a bit of pandemic hobby in late spring 2020. Ended up spending quite a few months messing around with oil blends, comparing ratios, seeing what one type does better than another by comparison, rather then relying on shitty descriptions online (boy there are some shitty soap sites with bad recipies. Stuff that would go rancid in months because of absurdly high linoleic content, etc) The amount of time that you can put in on just the chemistry side if you care to is amazing. I havent used bees wax, but longer chain unsaturated fats that are solid or waxy at room temp, boy to they go off fast. When you showed the temp I had a brief panic moment "thats going to seize instantly" Because I forgot hot process was a thing, because I dont ever mess with it, and I havent touched cold process since the end of 2020 because I ended up making enough soaps for myself, a few friends, and my parents to last for 2 years...
The main thing I learned regarding chemistry during my Biochemistry major earning was that: everything has a chemistry and every inch of it is going to be 5x more complicated than you originally thought. Perfect example: concrete. Original guess was its just a set amount of small rocks in a solution that sets into a solid. Hell no. That stuff can be far more complicated depending on time to set, strength of the concrete after setting, the chemical properties of the concrete components, the effects of the environment on those properties, the lifespan of the concrete, etc. I could not stand to be a chemical engineer 😂. It would drive me insane.
"Hope you enjoyed" Let me just tell you Cody, you don't need to hope. I definitely did. I don't know why I found your experiment today so hilarious yet still intriguing. Can't wait to see the soap fossils.
There used to be a product to soap sliver recycling that was basically a spring-loaded grater in the bottom of a box which would grate the slivers to make useable shavings for hand washing. Might be useful if you can find or make one for the beeswax soap.
I wonder what else it could be used for. I imagine there are applications in which a very hard soap could be very useful. I can't speak to the power of the soap, but maybe there are applications for cleaning appliances/dishes? Something where you wouldn't want the soap to dissolve quickly and want it to resist some force.
dishwashing/clothes washing machines might be a good example, as it seems to also be generating little ammounts of foam, which is required for this appliances
Looks like a great deal of experimentation and recipe transcription required to create consistent results. Sounds like a fun and rewarding hobby. Could even turn into a revenue stream if you felt like it. Chicken Ranch Natural Beeswax Soaps.
Big difference between bee's wax and fat is that fat is mostly fatty esters of glycerol (triglycerides), whereas wax is mostly fatty esters of fatty alcohols. So after saponification, your soap should have quite a high content of fatty alcohols, which will remain much more hydrophobic than the fatty acid salts portion.
@codyslab 7 years ago I started watching your bee series. After awile I moved back to the cuntryside and I found a bee guru here that holds courses in top bar hives and after a course I was sold. this year I built three hives of my own and they are all thriving. I am soo glad you made the series since it was a huge stepping point for me to start bee keeping. greetings from Sweden
With harder soap fats you're supposed to "superfat" them, AKA add more fat than the typical Sodium Hydroxide to fat ratio. This typically makes for a softer soap, though I'm not exactly sure about how much it would work for pure beeswax. Though this is also generally a good thing to do in order to assure there's no leftover Sodium Hydroxide!
Apart from giving me fight club vibes, you could add the flakes of bee's wax soap as an exfoliating substance in a a softer soap substrate. This is usually done with left over ground coffee or something, but then you just end up with a ton of ground coffee down your sink and you are back to square 1 ( they say it's good for the enviroment as they are recycling the coffee grounds, in reality they are just selling them to you twice), at least this way the exfoliating particles are actually soap too!
Would be interesting to see how this works for something like a phonograph record. The so called ''wax'' cylinders that were used early on were actually a type of soap that contained aluminum in the recipe I seem to recall.
Haha I sware rocks soap chemistry must be a natural progression glad to see you are doing well Cody a bit worried about a few of you RU-vid guys lately vids have slowed down thought you may have given up like nurdrage
perhaps a rounder shape would remove the hardness issues, and an increase in surface area would improve the creation of lather/bubbles perhaps a golfball shape, round and with additional surface area?
Great to see ya buddy love watching your videos always very interesting glad you are doing well I seen a friend make lye soap once and I seen it done at a Amish place amazing what they had to do back in the old days to have soap lol thanks for sharing buddy
Always nice to see you back in business. Your gardening series really inspired me to grow something too. Wouldn't you talk about the reaction when you made the beeswax a soap and it just puffs as a foam in a second?
Cody I just want to sincerely thank you and commend you for being a great youtuber over the many years. So many youtubers sell out and completely change their personality and are completely focused on money that they lose who they are. Thank you for staying true, and not becoming obnoxious and greedy. Your videos have always improved, and never have gotten worse. Thank you for making great content
Hey Cody. I always like to see bees and bee-themed videos. I found the link to this one on Twitter by chance as it is unlisted. Would you have listed it in one of your channels sooner or later, or will I have to watch out for sneaky Twitter releases too?
I was playing around with soapmaking recently with some expired MCT oil I had around, and noticed that beeswax was on the sap chart. Was wondering what that would turn out like, it's really too bad it doesn't carry over the nice beeswax smell. Lanolin was also on the chart and I don't know what to expect from saponifying that since it's so goopy and sticky,
You could make the beeswax soap into coarse granules and then incorporate those into your softer bar of soap. Might be a nice exfoliant or grease scrub.
I can't see Cody selling many bars of this type of soap, it has no fragrance, and extremely user unfriendly for those with skin. Still nice experiment. Maybe good for soap carving ?
What I've learned from this video is that beeswax can actually look a lot like earwax at certain stages of this whole process shown here. Very interesting!
You really have the habit of bringing me on the right track when my research into a topic has led me nowhere. I'm sure if I studied chemistry, it'd be much easier, but now I'm confident I can make a low carbon impact vegetarian soap! Thanks a lot!
I think what would be awesome for you would be a lathe and mill to build all sorts of custom components. Maybe soap moulds, extruders, structural stuff, brackets to hold things together, etc Or cheaper with 3d printing. Personally I dont believe I have the time for it but I think since youre one of the legit youtube channels out there so you can afford to undertake these things
If the last shot in the video are the items you're going to hide in your bars of soap so that it can slowly be exposed as you use it, I think these are good but I think that the more detail in the "artifact" the better people will like it. If it's just the general shape of fossils I think people might not appreciate them as much. JMO mind you... *: )*
Those little shavings would be cool as an abrasive. I've seen some soap bars use mildly abrasive particles to help with scrubbing. Could make for a fun sandstone soap.
In a far distant future, intelligent mice will be marveling over archaeological wonders of random fossils found in the soap deposits discovered in Cody's basement.
The doctor squatch soap sounds like they’re trying to sell you on how good it tastes when they read off the ingredients lol. I think it’s to marinade us for the sasquatches.
Sharp soap! For when you need more tears in your washing procedure If you grind this up really fine, could you add it to the soap mixture so late in the process that it doesnt re-melt, leaving you with a graininess in the final soap bar? You could potentially make a bar with beeswax soap exfoliant in it
