Can We Talk About Water Glass (Sodium Silicate)?
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How about that - totally forgot until you mentioned it but I have some down in the shop. It's used for hand rubbed wood finishes. I tried the method once and filed it away for future reference, too time consuming for most projects but the right thing for the right one.
People see silicate and think that it's the chemical itself that kills you - it's crystalline silicate dust that does it, so I wouldn't worry much about sodium silicate in a pipe.
Silica dust is sharp and when fresh the fractured surfaces of it are chemically active and the dust sticks to the alveoli in the lungs, impeding their ability to exchange O2 and CO2. After a few months in the environment the surface activity of silica particles drops a lot as far as I remember, and while still clogging and harmful, it's nowhere near as bad as fresh dust.
So I don't have much fear of some kind of sodium silicate vapor personally. But I won't discourage anyone worried about it - we all get to make our choices and live with the results of them.
If you ever decide to, get a new bottle. It has a strict shelf life and won't dry / set up properly past a certain age.
Interesting. I'm a Geologist (retired) as well. I was thinking along the same lines.
I actually have a small jar of ash from Mount St. Helens. I was sailing on a coastwise tanker on the West coast and we were going up the Colombia river when the eruption started. We were due for a two week stay in drydock in Portland anyway. The fact the river was closed to ship traffic for two weeks after the eruption was kinda remarkable. Anyway, we had ash falling all over Portland for days and days. I swept some up off the deck of the ship and put it in a jar. And still have it. My original thinking with the Sodium Silicate was to mix a little of this ash with it to make a really hard, long lasting repair to a bowl with burnout starting.
But, after reading @georged advise to toss it if it's old, idk if I want to buy a whole bottle, again just to experiment with. I was wondering about it going bad over time. You can definitely see that either salts or silicates have dissolved out of solution.
The ash is super fine!
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All these geologists coming out of the woodwork! Who would have thunk it? I'm one geophysics class short of a Geology major and wonder how my life would have turned out if I had completed that class 40 years ago. (I gave up that gig because fieldwork was too exhausting and I found myself falling asleep and leaving my contact lens on the eyepiece of the petrographic microscope!). What does this have to do with water glass? Nothing!
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Geology seems like the field of education best represented throughout all other, non-geologic, fields of employment :D These days I work in astronomy research. Best guess is due to geology employment being rather spotty - I worked various other jobs after the gold crash in the late 1990's/early 2000's and operating a telescope was the one that stuck.
I expect the shelf life of water glass has to do with the pH of the solution changing over time and causing silica gel to precipitate. What would cause that I'm not sure, my grasp of chemistry is a bit sketchy after all. Perhaps oxygen or other atmospheric gasses migrating through the plastic bottle? That does happen, though I forget the name for it. A woodworking friend of mine who's a retired chemist talked about it a lot.
Another use for sodium silicate is sealing concrete - sounds like it's best with fresh concrete just past the green stage. Apparently it provides some free silica for the very alkaline portland cement to bond to. Without the silica, any excess portland cement just dries out and is relatively easily eroded over the first few years.
None of this is really relevant to pipes of course - it's just a kind of treat to be looking around one subject and see mention of something that touches on so many other interesting ones. Thanks again to everyone contributing to the discussion - it's like the internet of 20 years ago! :D
I do think a mixture of fresh water glass and pumice will make a reasonable repair for meerschaum. Got to find the time to do a bit of experimenting with that.
I expect the shelf life of water glass has to do with the pH of the solution changing over time and causing silica gel to precipitate. What would cause that I'm not sure, my grasp of chemistry is a bit sketchy after all. Perhaps oxygen or other atmospheric gasses migrating through the plastic bottle? That does happen, though I forget the name for it. A woodworking friend of mine who's a retired chemist talked about it a lot.
Another use for sodium silicate is sealing concrete - sounds like it's best with fresh concrete just past the green stage. Apparently it provides some free silica for the very alkaline portland cement to bond to. Without the silica, any excess portland cement just dries out and is relatively easily eroded over the first few years.
None of this is really relevant to pipes of course - it's just a kind of treat to be looking around one subject and see mention of something that touches on so many other interesting ones. Thanks again to everyone contributing to the discussion - it's like the internet of 20 years ago! :D
I do think a mixture of fresh water glass and pumice will make a reasonable repair for meerschaum. Got to find the time to do a bit of experimenting with that.
Check out Peterson Pipe Notes for their All Purpose Bowl Coating. It's just activated charcoal and gum arabic. I've bought two new Petersons in the last two months and, with this bowl coating, they have smoked sweet right out of the gate.
Not entirely accurate. Unsmoked briar will dry out and oxidize over time, in the process becoming more vulnerable to cracking on the first bowl. An insulator, which is what the silicate coating offers, along with careful smoking for the first dozen or so bowls of the vintage virgin, will mitigate that risk. It's also useful for old chambers that have developed spider webbing, or heat cracks, not an uncommon feature in antique pipes.
Another use of sodium silicate is to "glue up" paper cartridges for black powder rifles or revolvers, etc.
My interest in this is for the repair of an old meerschaum I would like to continue smoking. It has a pin hole in the bottom of the bowl. If I can't repair it, the pipe is garbage - one has to keep a finger over the hole when drawing, and it makes an annoying gurgling sound due to the dip right before the draw hole in the stem.
For coating inside a wood bowl I don't really know. The couple vintage briars I've smoked didn't suffer from the problems sablebrush52 mentioned, but I could see it being useful for those cases.
For coating a new bowl one is intending to smoke promptly, I would agree with your statement, likely no need for it.
Meerschaum pipes often suffer from overzealous reaming. I once repaired a hole in the bottom of the chamber
with a mixture of egg white and plaster of paris. Egg white and chalk ( calciumcarbonate ) works fine too .
Egg white and pumice powder I never tried. I reckon the - powder gives a more greyish look .
I have a plastic Rayex pipe where a good portion of the pressed Meerschaum lining disintegrated (probably due to a moist, half-smoked bowl of tobacco being left in the chamber fifty years prior)—I was able to patch the missing areas with Plaster of Paris to reconstruct the lining; the pipe is smokable again. You should be able to fill the hole in your pipe and keep smoking it for years to come.
Just water (to the consistency of maybe pancake batter), packed it into the missing areas, let dry, and maybe some light sanding once cured. Done. Smoke and repeat.
I can see that sodium silicate could have special applications in some repairs and/or restorations. That gets into an area of expertise I don't claim to have. But I wouldn't like to see it dropped on consumers in factory pipes or sold as a general remedy for pipes.
Not to get fanciful, but I wonder if the old homespun tradition of coating new pipe bowls with honey was addressing burn-out problems, since it was designed to generate cake thus avoiding burn-out. It probably has some insulating properties as well. It's organic and I doubt it has any deleterious health effects.
I don't use honey on pipes except when it is offered by the pipe shop, and then I do it just for the old tradition, more social than for preserving the pipe. My uncoated pipes have broken in well, no coatings necessary.
Not to get fanciful, but I wonder if the old homespun tradition of coating new pipe bowls with honey was addressing burn-out problems, since it was designed to generate cake thus avoiding burn-out. It probably has some insulating properties as well. It's organic and I doubt it has any deleterious health effects.
I don't use honey on pipes except when it is offered by the pipe shop, and then I do it just for the old tradition, more social than for preserving the pipe. My uncoated pipes have broken in well, no coatings necessary.