Difficulty getting recipe to fill mold...

[soapinintx]

Bare with me, I'm new at this. Never even posted on a thread of any kind before... I have a soap mold with the dimensions of 16.25 x 3.5 x 2.5. (volume is 142.1875, times 0.4 = 56.875, which is the surface area of the bottom of the mold) Maybe I have misunderstood, but I thought that meant that mold would hold 56.875 ounces of soap... So, I made the following recipe using hot process.
7.9 oz coconut oil
6.3 oz Crisco, new
15.9 oz olive oil
1.6 oz castor oil
10.5 oz brewed coffee
4.4 oz lye
5.34 oz coffee grounds
4 oz coffee after the mixture cooked to the volcano stage.
(SMH... hindsight says WAY too many coffee grounds and the soap is way softer than I wanted... Figure that was the mass quantity of olive oil... However, this was my first batch of soap... ever... LOL!!!)
All of that I could handle. Live and learn. But, what really messed me up was that the batch only filled the mold to 1 1/4 inches. I thought it would fill to 2 1/2 inches.
Have pity on a newbie and please explain what I've done wrong... Thank you SOOO much!!!

 

[Obsidian]

Your mold will hold 56.87 oz of OIL, not finished soap. The mold calculations don't take water, lye or other additives into account. Put your recipe back in a lye calc and set the oil weight to 56 or 57 oz.

Your soap was soft due to the massive amount of water you used. The soap will harden as it dries out. For things like coffee grounds, its generally added at 1-2 tsp per pound of oil in the recipe.

 

[SaltedFig]

Hi @Susan Shaw

The 0.4 multiplier (from this thread: https://www.soapmakingforum.com/threads/how-to-figure-how-much-oil-for-mold.2909/) gives you the imperial weight of the OILS you need for your batch.

Your recipe has a total oil weight of 30.1 oz, which is just over 50% of the amount you calculated as being needed.
This is why your mold only has half the height of batter.

 

[soapinintx]

Ohhhhh..... Well, that would be why I have a batch of really short soap, huh?!? Ha ha ha!!!

As far as the amount of water, coffee in this instance, I was using a recipe I found online. And that is why they say to put every recipe into a lye calculator to double check it before you use it. SMH... So, you're telling me that there's still hope for this batch of soap?? That is if one doesn't mind exfoliating down to the quick!

Alrighty, then! Off to the lye calculator I go!!! Thank you SO much for your help!!

 

[SaltedFig]

Absolutely there's still hope!
(High olive soaps take a while to harden up anyway, so don't worry too much yet!).

One small suggestion - if you are using a calculator other than the one from this forum, immediately change to using either lye concentration or lye ratio - you will get more understandable results by relating your water to the amount of lye you use (which changes, according to the saponification value of the oils - it looks like this recipe used the older "water as a percentage of oils", which gives too much water for high olive recipes). A lye concentration of around 33.3%, or a ratio of water:hydroxide of 2:1, is a good starting point.

PS. Congratulations on your first soap!
(You will be able to cut it differently and still get soap bars, so it's all good ... and this recipe will easily make soap-balls too, so you can do that with the scraps [or keep a little bit of the soft soap and cure it in an airtight bag to make soap clay ... oh, the possibilities! ... Welcome to the addiction )

 

[cmzaha]

I would suggest making smaller than 5lb batches which is what yours will be