Steve M. (administrator)

Greetings, and welcome to our new SBM Soapmakers' Forums!  I'm Steve Mushynsky, site administrator and co-founder along with my lovely spouse Gina of Summer Bee Meadow back in 1999.

We established our first SBM website in early 2000 for the purpose of spreading knowledge about handcrafted soapmaking and providing soapmaking supplies in convenient quantities for hobbyists, both at the SBM website and at Ebay. We created our SBM Soapmaking Calculator in late 2000 and updated it to handle liquid soaps in 2001. It was subsequently updated to take into account the percentage of impurities found in available supplies of sodium hydroxide beads and in potassium hydroxide flakes, making ours arguably the most accurate soapers' calculator available.

With the removal from the the market of the soapers' standard, Red Devil Lye, we began to see large increases in purchases of NaOH at Ebay, which was becoming a very 'fractious' marketplace, indeed.  We were overwhelmed with NaOH orders and decided to cease our involvement at Ebay in the late 2000's.

We were soon thereafter 'found' by large numbers of automotive 'hydroxy' enthusiasts - people who believe that they can double their cars' mileage, reduce harmful emissions to zero, etc by use of a device to split water into hydrogen and oxygen and then suck the mix into their engines. Needless to say, these groups included far more than their share of 'interesting' folks, some of whom proceeded to harass us mercilessly as their torrent of literally thousands of orders for hydroxide chemicals needed to operate their 'inventions' caused delays in order fulfillments. Unfortunately, this occured simultaneously with rapid large increases in our supply costs. The result was way too much work with negative profit and a real degredation of my personal health.

To add insult to injury (or visa versa), I had a serious road accident and spent over a month recovering from a head and eye injury when I was forced off road into a re-paving area by traffic while riding an electric bike I designed and built. Skulls are more fragile than one might think. Helmets are a very good thing, indeed! As my personal health had continued to deteriorate for years due to a growth removal along with part of thyroid, followed by diabetes and chronic, increasing endocrine imbalances, Gina and I decided to inactivate Summer Bee Meadow as a business until I could function better and to allow me to concentrate on my other employment (13 years with The Home Depot after 20-plus years in banking).

I left Home Depot in mid-2009 and have been able to return my attention to Summer Bee Meadow and some other projects as well. We created an entirely new website (based on the Drupal CMS) and started creating a new Advanced Soap Calculator, which was just recently finished. I also finished refurbishing a fast Apple laptop computer purchased for a pittance at Ebay so I can get things done much quicker than with my old Apple G4. I may post details of our self-regulating homemade soap oven. I may even get to rebuild my wrecked electric bike soon, if Gina lets me...

We are now in process of creating the new SBM Soapmakers' Forums and will then return to reestablishing SBM as a source of a unique and conveniently presented supplies for soapmaking. We will be bringing back our soaps for sale, our pre-made liquid soap bases, a new line of soap batch molds and cutters ('ready to go' for about 2 years, now...) and some other hard to find items.

We will do this by 'bootstrapping' the business without benefit of bank financial support as that has become far too restrictive and expensive in the present market context, so progress will be slow, but steady. The key has been to construct systems with very, very little overhead expense (If you want a site built for yourself, contact me).

Stick with us and see what we do as we progress!