Thanks, Fred for "witches brew"  you came up with. The potassium nitrate
could be adding "hardness" or mineral back to the water, nitrates?
Counteract some of the alkalinity?? Your brown soap is REALLY alkaline from
some first hand washing experiences, or almost no hands left after washing.
 Curious!

This brown soap is called Fels Naptha, guaranteed to be "Grandma's old
fashioned version of lye soap"!  Wickedly strong! This soap is great for
taking out grease spots (after spaghetti dinner splashes or greasy food
drippings on pants, shirts, tablecloths, etc) and washing up after poison
oak exposures to skin. It is not exactly gentle to skin, dirt cheap - we
keep a bar in home laundry room for greasy kid stuff. The smell brings back
nostalgic memories of down home on Oregon farm - kid days and the only soap
my grandfather would use, he hated #$@ ^$#& #$&$#@^%^# flowery stuff! 

Addional word about BIZ use, check progress after 1 - 2 hours, same thing
happens to cartilage, it separates from bone, and other boney attachments
disengage.  Be sure to handle BIZ with gloves - it eats skin in
concentrated form. 

Bemused in Montana!

Gayle Callis  
 
>"Liquid Soap". Reighard and Jennings, "Anatomy of the Cat" [Oops! Sorry
>kitty!], 1935, Holt Reinhart
>
>Soft water		2000ml ("Soft" is not a scientific term!)
>Strong ammonia	150ml  (for glazed eyes, opaque NICtitating membranes and,
>of course, alkalinity)
>KNO3			12g (for suppression of something? John and
>Abigail?)
>Hard soap (brown)	75g  (We used to save the shavings of the brown soap
>used in the local Cub Scout carving tutorials.  We liked the brown soap,
>because it WAS harder than Ivory!  This soap is still available in a double
>bar with attractive white wrapping with pink printing.  You can't tell a
>soap by its cover!) 
>
>Heat the mixture to boiling until homogeneous.
>Immerse the bone and boil for 40 min
>Pour off the liquid and renew it.
>Boil another 30min or until the soft parts come away easily.
>[Boil too long and the epiphyses will separate.]
>The bone can be rinsed in water.
>The bone can be defatted, after drying, in bnenzene/zylene.   
>
>Cheers (it almost feels like Friday),
>
>Fred Monson
>