It's long... mine are always long so get a coffee...
I had just finished a new batch of test soap. Seems all my batches are tester soaps. I've got enough batches and pucks to clean up every man, woman and child and those in conception in the neighborhood for 10 square blocks! We're getting close though better I think than hand grenades and horseshoes. My soaps are presently all tallow based. I dabble with some lard now and again but it's just too much to concentrate on when testing formulas so tallow it is.
I got curious about consumption, no not the disease... but just much other fellow shavers in the forum might be consuming during a single shave. My soap is not a hard puck, it's not soft either, it's a some where in between puck, but puck it is.
For my tests I simply used one of my stainless steel testing bowls. Picked up about 30 of these things locally. They have a 2.25 inch flat base, stand just under 2 inches high and the circumference at the top around the lip is just under 4.5 inches. They are very light, easy to clean, easy to stack, easy to label, easy to handhold, turn or twist when making lather where you don't have to constantly push it back down which alters timing. and easy to make a great lather in, so well they're just easy overall. I put one of my test pucks into it after warming it for 15 seconds in a nuker. If I just put it in raw it spins, useless... so to counter that I soften it and press in place. As my test pucks are 2.5 inches fitment to a 2.25 inch flat bottom is easy. They stick and stay in place, perfect!
I have a bunch of new brushes some Badgers and some Bores thanks to my BAD (Brush Acquisition Disorder) which is not much different than John Hollock's RAD (Razor Acquisition Disorder) I found the symptoms are actually identical! For the test I used an Omega bore brush nothing fancy, about 12 bucks locally. I've already broken it in testing the lathering of my soaps. I even shaved with it loads of times and the bristles are not prickly.
So I use it to load my brush. I'm a simple guy really I am and so I don't load the brush and move on to another bowl to make lather. I do it right on the puck and I do this because I'm constantly testing as of late more than ever. I can't be bothered with transferring to another bowl either a single one which you clean up each time or a bunch of other lather making bowls the clean up would be horrendous. My batches are labelled so I know exactly what I'm messing with each new batch and I have all the older ones lined up to retest for comparisons... all kinds of comparisons. I don't worry about consumption of product because after all I'm making it. Now this might skew things but let's let that ride for a minute.
I have a timer near the kitchen sink generally my iPhone's timer, I do all my testing in the kitchen area. Thankfully I don't have a wife to keep herd on what goes on in there. I just have to watch I don't eat something from one of those bowls. I try to do the same cycle each time to anything newly cooked. I use hot tap water as hot as it is in my house. Come to think of it I should measure that temperature for the records. I weight the soap and dry bowl on a KD-7000 scale set to grams mode. I flood the bowl with water to wet the soap, then shake as much out of the bowl as I can by inverting it. I wet the brush under the running hot tap, do a semi-double shake, hit the timer, and proceed to make lather right on the puck. It take about 30 to 45 seconds to get my lather to the point where I stop. I think it's enough to do say a 2 pass shave, at least my two pass shave. I rinse the brush under the tap and use it to clear the lather from the bowl while rinsing the bowl under the tap until it's all gone. Then I wipe down the outside of the bowl and the inner rim as far down as is reasonable without touching the soap. Sure there might be a few drops of water skewing the results and then I re-weigh the bowl and soap. If I do everything the same or consistently each time. What I find is that 3 grams of soap are used on average.
I use the above methodically because I want to know how long it take for me to kinda load a brush. It's about 30-45 second more towards 45 seconds. If I go over a minute I think that's too long. Under 30 seconds seems too short. Of course this depends on a lot of things I suppose. Like how much water is in the brush, how much pressure you use and I would think the softness of the puck plays in as in how much soap transfers to the brush but using the same brush, sort of the same pressure, same amount of water I seem to use up or remove 3 grams of soap on average.
So I'm wondering or very curious how much soap the average shaver in the forums use with their own techniques?
jk
I had just finished a new batch of test soap. Seems all my batches are tester soaps. I've got enough batches and pucks to clean up every man, woman and child and those in conception in the neighborhood for 10 square blocks! We're getting close though better I think than hand grenades and horseshoes. My soaps are presently all tallow based. I dabble with some lard now and again but it's just too much to concentrate on when testing formulas so tallow it is.
I got curious about consumption, no not the disease... but just much other fellow shavers in the forum might be consuming during a single shave. My soap is not a hard puck, it's not soft either, it's a some where in between puck, but puck it is.
For my tests I simply used one of my stainless steel testing bowls. Picked up about 30 of these things locally. They have a 2.25 inch flat base, stand just under 2 inches high and the circumference at the top around the lip is just under 4.5 inches. They are very light, easy to clean, easy to stack, easy to label, easy to handhold, turn or twist when making lather where you don't have to constantly push it back down which alters timing. and easy to make a great lather in, so well they're just easy overall. I put one of my test pucks into it after warming it for 15 seconds in a nuker. If I just put it in raw it spins, useless... so to counter that I soften it and press in place. As my test pucks are 2.5 inches fitment to a 2.25 inch flat bottom is easy. They stick and stay in place, perfect!
I have a bunch of new brushes some Badgers and some Bores thanks to my BAD (Brush Acquisition Disorder) which is not much different than John Hollock's RAD (Razor Acquisition Disorder) I found the symptoms are actually identical! For the test I used an Omega bore brush nothing fancy, about 12 bucks locally. I've already broken it in testing the lathering of my soaps. I even shaved with it loads of times and the bristles are not prickly.
So I use it to load my brush. I'm a simple guy really I am and so I don't load the brush and move on to another bowl to make lather. I do it right on the puck and I do this because I'm constantly testing as of late more than ever. I can't be bothered with transferring to another bowl either a single one which you clean up each time or a bunch of other lather making bowls the clean up would be horrendous. My batches are labelled so I know exactly what I'm messing with each new batch and I have all the older ones lined up to retest for comparisons... all kinds of comparisons. I don't worry about consumption of product because after all I'm making it. Now this might skew things but let's let that ride for a minute.
I have a timer near the kitchen sink generally my iPhone's timer, I do all my testing in the kitchen area. Thankfully I don't have a wife to keep herd on what goes on in there. I just have to watch I don't eat something from one of those bowls. I try to do the same cycle each time to anything newly cooked. I use hot tap water as hot as it is in my house. Come to think of it I should measure that temperature for the records. I weight the soap and dry bowl on a KD-7000 scale set to grams mode. I flood the bowl with water to wet the soap, then shake as much out of the bowl as I can by inverting it. I wet the brush under the running hot tap, do a semi-double shake, hit the timer, and proceed to make lather right on the puck. It take about 30 to 45 seconds to get my lather to the point where I stop. I think it's enough to do say a 2 pass shave, at least my two pass shave. I rinse the brush under the tap and use it to clear the lather from the bowl while rinsing the bowl under the tap until it's all gone. Then I wipe down the outside of the bowl and the inner rim as far down as is reasonable without touching the soap. Sure there might be a few drops of water skewing the results and then I re-weigh the bowl and soap. If I do everything the same or consistently each time. What I find is that 3 grams of soap are used on average.
I use the above methodically because I want to know how long it take for me to kinda load a brush. It's about 30-45 second more towards 45 seconds. If I go over a minute I think that's too long. Under 30 seconds seems too short. Of course this depends on a lot of things I suppose. Like how much water is in the brush, how much pressure you use and I would think the softness of the puck plays in as in how much soap transfers to the brush but using the same brush, sort of the same pressure, same amount of water I seem to use up or remove 3 grams of soap on average.
So I'm wondering or very curious how much soap the average shaver in the forums use with their own techniques?
jk
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