50:50 lard:olive oil. The results are in.

[The Efficacious Gentleman]

Everyone has been so helpful, I really appreciate the willingness of you all to share your hard-earned knowledge. As someone who only plans to make soap for myself and a little bit of gifting, I have found it invaluable--it has shortened the learning curve considerably.
I have another question about interpreting the soapcalc numbers. I decided I should just go to some tried and true recipes from experienced soapers instead of starting right out making up my own and like a good little soaper, I run any recipe through a lye calculator before I think about using it. I was hoping I could learn something by comparing the numbers with the book's description of the soap.
The recipe I'm using for an example is from a book by Delores Boone, in the description she says that the oils are easy to obtain and are economical but have minimal conditioning. It uses canola, castor, CO, and OO and soapcalc gives it a 79 for conditioning. Isn't that the high end of the range?
On another occasion, I decided to keep increasing the percentage of cocoa butter (because I had read it contributed to hardness) and see what it said. But every time I raised it, the hardness number went down! And it didn't help with the conditioning at all. I'm beginning to think there's no point in looking at those numbers at all and that's kind of discouraging because for someone who won't make pounds and pounds of soap, being able to use something like that to help choose what to do could be so helpful.

I think this might have been worth a whole new thread - a little bit of a hijack of this thread.

In answer, CO will up the cleansing figure and most people use less than 25% CO unless they're making a salt bar.

 

[cm4bleenmb]

You are so right Efficacious Gentleman, and I apologize. It would be an interesting thread, I am very curious to see what others have to say about it. I think I will take my last post and start one!

Nevermind, I found this and hopefully it will start some more discussion: http://www.soapmakingforum.com/showthread.php?t=33563