How to Use a Lye Caculator for Soap Making

If you want to learn the craft of soap making, it is necessary that you learn to use a lye calculator. A lye calculator does just that, it tell you how much lye and water/liquid to use with your amount and type of oils.
There are several good soap caculators.  MMS is a popular one.
The caculator I like to use is SoapCalc.  The following instructions pertain to this one.

Easy steps for using the SoapCalc.

(1) Select NaOH for bar soap (KOH is for liquid soap)

(2) Select pounds, ounces, or grams (usually in ounces or grams)

(3) 38% of water to oils is good for beginners (some use 35%, you will get a little faster trace)

(4) Superfat at 5% is about average.  I superfat at 6.5% for a little more conditioning/oily bar. (the lower this superfat number is, the more lye crystals you use and a greater percent of your oils are saponified.)  Some people add oil at trace and this is also called "superfatting".  I don't do this, I simply superfat at a higher % to begin with.and that does the same thing.  In other words, some oils are left in the soap without being saponified.

(5) This section gives you the qualities of the oils.  Click an oil in the column and you will see the property numbers of that oil in Column "One".

(6) and (7) Select your oils from th eoil column and add (+) to your list, giving percentages or by weight (you have the option to select).  Your percentage of total HARD oils used should equal out to about 60%.  SOFT oils will be the remainder 40%.  Play with the caculator and you will soon learn what oils are considered hard or soft. 

(8) Caculate and View your recipe, make changes, etc.

I hope this is easy to understand.
Study the calculator and soon you will be making your own soap recipes.