 In this series' ongoing quest to rebuild civilization from scratch, one advantage we have is future knowledge about diseases and germs and the portents of hygiene when you live in a world where you still haven't invented medicine. We're going to dabble in some caveman chemistry and unlock one of the last remaining simple machines and utilize its power to crush olives into oil, where we're getting clean with the help of the ultimate cleaning substance, soap. Everything we use comes from 8,000 generations of collective innovation and discovery, but could an average person figure it all out themselves and work their way from the stone age to today? That's a question we're exploring. Each week I try to take that next step forward in human history. My name is Andy and this is how to make everything. Be sure to subscribe and turn on notifications so you don't miss the next step in this journey. Thank you to Unbounce for sponsoring today's video. 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That's unbounce.com, promo code htme for 20% off or click the link below. We previously covered soulmaking several years ago but now within our confines of our reset and rebuilding civilization, this is going to introduce some new challenges and tools we'll be limited to. However, the science behind soap and why it is such an effective cleaner has remained the same. You've heard the term that oil and water don't mix? Well, they do when soap is used. That's because one end of the soap molecule is hydrophilic or water loving and the other is hydrophobic, water hating, which makes it a perfect middleman between these two chemicals. These molecules and the soap bind with the dirt and grease allowing the grime saturated molecules to wash off. Soap does a great job of getting rid of grease and that has to do with the fact that it is derived from fat itself. Soap is made when the fatty acids from animal fat or plant-based oils mix with an alkaline solution forming a fatty acid salt. In this process, called suponification, the alkaline reacts with the fatty acids and they neutralize each other. The resulting chemicals are soap, water, and glycerin. First up to make the soap, we need to do some basic chemistry. First gathering the basic ingredients. We need a lime stone rock from along the Mississippi River and the salt from a specific lake in Wyoming. The first step for our chemistry is to turn the limestone I collected, which is composed of calcium carbonate into lime or calcium oxide. For this, you need a big hot fire with the limestone added. Once hot enough, the calcium oxide thermally decomposes through a process called calcination, which liberates a molecule of carbon dioxide and leaves quick lime. Last time I threw some limestone into this fire, burned it down for quite a while and I should have fired it into lime. So now I should be able to react this with water and dissolve it and that should produce a compound called quick lime or slack lime. Mix this water, the lime turns into calcium hydroxide, which is not very soluble in water. So by straining the solid precipitate, remove any water soluble impurities. Get the lime all separated now. So next, we'll make the lye. So we're going to combine it with the soda ash from the natron. So the salt we dried out from the lake water we collected in Wyoming. The lake water from the specific lake contains a large portion of sodium carbonate or soda ash. Soda ash is a weak base, which itself could be used to make some primitive forms of soap. But for a high quality solid bar of soap that we're used to today, we want to chemically react it with the lime and produce lye, which is much more caustic. So I'll just rehydrate it in this water and then we'll add the lime. We should get our lye. About nine. Oh, I'm starting out pretty strong. All right, so now we add the lime to our saturated natron. The result of this should be an exothermic reaction. So it should heat up as it reacts. It's getting warm. All right, so it should have reacted now to produce lye in the solution and calcium carbonate that settled out. So now we'll just strain it. And the solution should be just our lye. Just do fluities. Then over a low heat, we evaporate off the water. So we have a solid powder of lye to make our soap with. With the lye made now, the main other ingredient we need will be an oil or fat to react it with. We previously explored the process of pressing olives with the use of the simple machine, the lever. But now, further along in history, it's time to rebuild the oil press with some of the latest technologies of this era. A new simple machine called the screw, as well as a new material to use, concrete. For some inspiration, we're looking at this oil press from Cypress made with a wooden screw held down with a wooden frame and a concrete foundation. Let's start by first making the wood frame. All right, so at this point, the saw mill I'm working on is a little undeveloped, just a hand saw at this point. It's gonna be a bit of a long-term project. See if I can fix the focus a little better, maybe cut. Now that we need the process of wood, we're going to use our newly forged Viking HX that should help us hew up some lumber. Should be a little quicker than the saw. We'll do some water power, it'll be a lot faster and at least a lot easier. Set it and forget it. Instead of chopping a fresh tree, we're going to reuse some old lumber. I got some old railroad ties and provide some better wood than the random down trees we find that have been have brought in the past. Ah, score peg, score hole, don't affect. While we work on the frame, Lauren got started on crushing the olives, using an also recently made tool, the mortar and pestle. Oh, went a little hard and smashed the pit. I think it's all in the flick of the wrist at the last. All right, so cut this fresh limb and rounded it off. Got it as even a diameter as I could. It's not perfect, a little bit of bend to it, but overall it should be close enough. We're making a very coarse thread on this. Later on, more sophisticated methods of carving very intricate and fine threads were developed. But at this point, they're mostly just hand carved. So that's basically what we're going to do. We're going to measure out that very large intervals and make a spiral groove down the whole thing, using just hand chisels and files to basically make a very large screw. And that'll go into the oil press and allow us to apply a fair amount of pressure to our olives. All right, so I did a bit more. It's just easy to get the screw a little bit more defined and deeper groove so it can hopefully pass through the threaded top of the press. So Lauren crushed roughly 1,000 olives. So now we can put them onto the little trivets we made before. Last time we did this with a lever, which was a little bit tricky, trying to balance it and put all the weight on it. So this time should be a little bit more straightforward. A simple screw should allow us to apply a pre-substantial downward force by just screwing it in. So let's give it a shot and see what we get. For some extra fragrance, we can harvest some lavender flowers. I got some in my nose. Now to combine all the ingredients to form the soap through a process called suponification. Well, Bill and I are going to make the soap using the lye that Andy made, some water, the oil that we pressed, and then we're gonna add some lavender for our scent. Mix it all together. Thank you, Bill. All right, Bill, we got your close up. So when you do mix the lye with water, it is caustic. So, ah. So we're gonna slowly and carefully add the lye to the water and not the other way around, because it is dangerous. You may want to be very careful not to breathe in these fumes, and if you're doing this at home, make sure you have proper ventilation. All right, so as you're stirring, the vessel's gonna heat up. I don't know if you can see, but there are fumes coming off of this. Blub, blub, blub, blub, blub. All right, now, take this guy. Slowly and carefully stir him in. It is sautéed. Orbitant soup. Okay, not entirely sure that this is working. Unsure of the results of the first attempt, Lauren gave it a second try, this time mixing the concoction for a much longer duration. But it's a lye that used to dissolve the lye. Grab the cheese soup. On a cold day. Mm, soup. Blub, blub, blub, blub, blub, blub, blub, blub. Come get your soup, Daniel! Okay, so that's gonna be a little test. Get your soup. Oh, pardoned over the weekend, and we are now going to remove it from the mold. This example mold, ooh, it just came right out. Made this little test batch to see how we can cut it and make sure the consistency is right so that when I slice it, it doesn't crumble. Nice, that won't be too bad. Definitely turned a lot better than our first couple attempts. All right, so I think the reason that this batch didn't really work out very well is because we did not mix it well enough. The first pours were definitely a lot more olive oily because it was at the top. And then as I continued to pour, the rest were just this sediment of lye which is definitely caustic. But this one, we took our notes from this failed attempt and stirred it a lot. And this caused the soap to saponify and that definitely helped and made a more uniform blend as when we poured it in the mold worked great. You know, ultimately we're gonna want it to be just neutral as it's a soap. So we're gonna test the pH of this water just to see that we have a fair starting point. All right, so that's good. Should be about a seven, which is neutral. I'm gonna take some of the soap, get it into here. Okay, science. Boink! Yeah, about the same. Neutral. Oh, I hate that. Okay. Mm. All right. So that's not great. I don't have high hopes for this. I am taking precautions. Okay, let's test this guy. Okay. I would not use this on my skin. Ta-da! I feel a bit more comfortable with this one. Much better. Some of the strip, it's a little splotchy so it seems like some of the Y might F survived the saponification process but I think it'd be safe to use it. All right, so we got the baking grease gonna apply a little bit to each quadrant. See what the most effective way of getting it out is. All right. Try to wash the grease out with just water. Doesn't seem to be having much effect but we didn't think it would, so. Okay. Some of our cursed olive oil soap. Nice leather. There's some of this guy over here. Okay. Yeah. Seems like it's working even though it doesn't suds store bought. Definitely a different color. Definitely more leather. Okay, let's see what they look like under the microscope. So we're gonna start with the one that we just rinsed off with the water. Ooh, okay. Olive oil soap. Wow. It doesn't look like it got any cleaner. There's still a lot of specs and stuff. Okay, coming in hot or better soap. Ooh. Okay, well this sample doesn't have, you know, the black specs that we saw in the other one. Looks pretty clean. Clean hair follicle. Love that. Now, store bought soap. Looks like a clean piece of hair. Looks the same as the last one, so that's good for us. I think it was pretty successful, which feels good. And I think our football is pretty happy about it. If you want to see us make things like this in the future, please support us on Patreon. And you can follow along on Instagram at htm everything. So stay clean. Pretty cool. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to subscribe and check out other content we have covering a wide variety of topics. 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