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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Burn it outside in a pile, or better yet, use it in your fireplace or woodstove.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Store your lye in a cool dark place until use. (The sooner the better.)
[edit] TipsDo 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.
this instruction taken from Wiki how to
The easiest method of making lye water is to drip water through wood ashes. Sounds real easy, but it is a bit more complicated than that. One method that combines new technology with old is to use a 10 foot length of plastic rain gutter, complete with a cap on one end and a down spout connection on the other end, and fasten it to fence posts about 4 feet off the ground. The down spout end should be about an inch lower than the capped end. Fill the gutter with an even layer of wood ashes, not tamped down or compacted. Water sprinkled on the ashes will filter out the lye and drip out the down spout end.
Under the down spout end of the rain gutter should be placed two plastic buckets. The bottom one collects the lye water, and should have a valve installed in the bottom to drain the lye water. The lid for the bottom bucket should have a half-dozen holes drilled in a circle about 6 inches from the middle of the lid, each hole being about ½" in diameter. The bucket above that should have matching holes drilled into the bottom, so any lye water will run out the bottom, through the holes in the lid below, and collect in the bottom bucket. Straw is packed tightly into the top bucket, with its lid holding down the straw. In the lid for the filter bucket, cut a hole that matches the down spout, and place a length of down spout between the rain gutter and the bucket.
What you now have is an automatic lye water machine. Because the system is "closed," rain water cannot dilute the lye solution, but rain can be used as the source of water for the ashes, so lye water can be made in the winter. During heavy winter rains, a board can be placed over all but the first foot or so of the gutter, which will limit the amount of water intake and still allow what rain falls into the first foot to filter through all of the ashes to the exit down spout.
The straw in the filter bucket acts exactly as a filter, removing any contaminants and purifying the lye water.
Remember that the composition of the wood ashes determines the quality of the lye produced. Soft wood ashes yield a lye that will only produce soft soap. Hardwood ash lye will make harder soap for bars, and the best ash of all is from seaweed, such as kelp. Kelp ash lye produces an extremely hard, durable soap. And here you thought the British fought the Falklands Island war over sheep! The finest kelp ash in the world comes from the sea around the Falklands.
Every part of the "automatic lye machine" listed above is made from plastic. Do not use any metal in the fabrication, particularly a reactive metal such as aluminum, as lye really is "caustic," and will quickly eat right through many metal containers.
Lye water may also be used for washing non-carpeted floors, followed by rinsing with cold clean water. The lye water will oxidize and sanitize the floor: any bacteria or insects will be killed. It can also be used to sanitize outhouses and latrines. Just be sure to wear rubber gloves and always use cold water to rinse, as hot water makes lye rather active.
this article taken from Mile's stairs survival shop
Very good articles. I may start making my own lye. Beth and I make soap but we have been using the store bought sodium hydroxide. I will use a plastic barrel instead of a wood barrel though. Do you think that will work?
absolutely.. the picture with the second article showed a double plastic bucket rig
Could pond water or creek water be used
jerry I think both will be ok i am going to post on how to make water soft and you may want to use that method on either if you feel you might have a high lime concentration in the waters.
**** just a note Hard water is what cuases our clothes to fade and wear easily after many repeated washes...
I REMEMBER READIN SOME WHERE YOUR LYE WAS READY TO USE WHEN IT GOT STRONG ENOUGH TO MELT A FEATHER. JUST THOUGHT THAT MIGHT BE HELPFUL.