A report on using silica glass on concrete, wood and perhaps other products --> https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/shows/2091066/

Enjoy.-

Looks like a powerful sealant, but I did wonder about buying boards pretreated this way and then cutting them to length with my power saw. Wonder if I'd need PPE while sawing. Finely powdered glass shooting out from the saw kerf sounds like a hazard to be handled carefully.

(One also dons PPE when cutting old pressure-treated lumber, due to the old stuff getting impregnated with an arsenic compound. Glad they switched to the safer copper-based a few years ago.)

We should be using PPE for every kind of timber and it seems like a case of some being worse than others but no wood dust being benign, even without timber preservatives or sealers. Around here the much prized but now rare Australian Red Cedar is known as a particularly bad one to breathe, as is Camphor Laurel (that smells nice), which was introduced here and in some areas has become a seriously invasive pest. There are others of concern.

Use of silica coatings does seem to present heightened health risks and even use of air filtration for the workspace won't eliminate all dusts.

On 3/30/2026 at 1:05 AM, Externet said:

https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/shows/2091066/

I looked at the video but the part I was most interested in was a secret. Even before I watched the video, I was expecting the liquid glass to be a silylating agent. There is nothing new about silylating agents in general. For example, they are used to render laboratory glassware hydrophobic. However, I was curious about the specific silylating agent in this case, which might be quite novel. I anticipate that the silylating agent would be more "glasslike" than typical silylating agents (which have organic groups attached).