I got around to trying to strip my dingy bath towels of build-up of homemade laundry soap and other gunk, despite my scientific hypothesis that build-up protects the fibers. There are someone else's directions for stripping laundry here, and also here with photos. For a bit more about the chemistry involved, see here.
I wasn't able to find Calgon locally, so I used extra washing soda.
After several hours of soaking in hot water and the stripping solution in the bathtub, the water was almost brown; not as dramatic a change as some of the online examples. The towels still look gray--stripping them didn't do much to restore them to whiteness--but they do have a crisper feel now, and are almost certainly more absorbent than they were.
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