After weeks of reading and gathering supplies, I finally decided to jump into CP. I chose a simple recipe and followed suggestions for first timers (no color, no FO, no stick blender, etc). It seemed like everything went well. I stirred by hand for ~30 min, until I was sure I was at trace, then poured into my lined shoe box and wrapped it up overnight. Unmolded after about 20 hours but when I tried to cut, it was very brittle and was just breaking into uneven chunks and lots of crumbs. It failed the zap test miserably! I know exactly where I went wrong but the question is how to fix it or whether to fix it at all. My problem is my well-intentioned husband who only listens to me about half of the time. He’s been listening to me talk about soaping, SAP values, NaOH, water discount, etc. for weeks. Water discount is something I’m interested in but had no intention of trying until I’ve got several soaping experiences under my belt. So, when I asked him to bring home some NaOH from work, we thought he’d save me some trouble and bring home a 50% NaOH/H2O solution. Well, I didn’t want to send him back to work on a Saturday but I didn’t want to wait until next weekend so I thought, “Okay, I consider myself above average at math. I can figure this out. No problem.” (Famous last words, right?) Here’s my recipe (2#): 45% Olive oil (14.4 oz) 25% Coconut oil (8 oz) 25% Lard (8 oz) 5% Castor Oil (1.6 oz) At 5% superfat, my manual calculations (confirmed by Brambleberry’s calculator) said I needed 4.4 oz NaOH to 10.6 oz water. So I did some creative math figuring that at 50%, my solution would be 4.4 oz NaOH to 8.8 oz water so I needed 13.2 oz of solution. I’m thinking I should’ve actually used 8.8 oz of solution. Can someone confirm my error? So, if I managed to mess up my first batch, should my second attempt at soap be a rebatch? Or should I just start anew? If I rebatch, how do I figure how much more oil (and which kinds) to add to my lye heavy batch? Thanks so much for your help. This board has been very helpful! Kat