The Country Chemical Supplies

On another thread, Twenty mule-team Borax was mentioned and got me to thinking. Nowadays you have a specially formulated chemically made product for each and every need from the multitude of different soaps and cleaners though all sorts of useful chemicals for killing weeds and bugs. These things OK I guess but they usually are very specialized and honestly, in this law-suet crazy world they are so weak that they are mostly almost useless.

People in the past made their own cleaners and such just as they also made most of their own medicines from available herbal and chemical things that they had on hand. The good thing about so many of those things, they generally had a lot of different uses.

This is a short list of the things that jump to mind...

White vinegar
Ammonia
Borax
Lye
Rock salt
Mineral oil
Turpentine
Baking Soda (sodium bicarbonate)
Washing Soda (sodium carbonate)
Peroxide
Penetrating oil
3 n 1 oil
Bleaching Powder
Various oxides

NEVER MIX AMMONIA AND BLEACH this makes chlorine gas and will burn your lungs!!!

The list is not really long and I am sure that there are others but this gives you the idea. My mom was always mixing up things for all sorts of different uses.

A product that is old school that has a multitude of uses is Zote Soap. this is a Mexican-made commercial lye soap. You can wash with it like any bar soap, grate it up and use it in the washer. Liquify it for dishes and even use it as catfish bait. Another old school product like that is hemp oil soap. Dr. Bronners Castile hemp oil is a good all-purpose soap.

What can you add and what recipiesdo you have for making home amde from scratch cleaners and other needed chemical based products?