- 1 hour ago
The old wood hardener everyone argues about is real, but it does not turn pine into oak. Elias Yoder breaks down what sodium silicate, or water glass, actually does inside wood, why hardness and strength are not the same thing, and why the internet’s favorite numbers and claims do not hold up when you go looking for the reports behind them.
He also explains the practical uses that do work: hardening a sacrificial wood surface, preserving eggs in a crock, and sealing a dusty concrete floor. Along the way, he warns about ruined blades, bad glue joints, brittle finishes, silica dust, and the safety risks of a caustic alkaline solution. The result is part workshop lesson, part homestead know-how, and part myth-busting guide for anyone interested in old-fashioned building materials, wood treatment, concrete sealing, and traditional food storage.
If you search for wood hardener, sodium silicate, water glass, preserving eggs, concrete floor hardener, or practical Amish home remedies, this conversation covers the real uses, the limits, and the mistakes to avoid. It is useful for homesteaders, woodworkers, and anyone comparing old-school methods with modern products.
He also explains the practical uses that do work: hardening a sacrificial wood surface, preserving eggs in a crock, and sealing a dusty concrete floor. Along the way, he warns about ruined blades, bad glue joints, brittle finishes, silica dust, and the safety risks of a caustic alkaline solution. The result is part workshop lesson, part homestead know-how, and part myth-busting guide for anyone interested in old-fashioned building materials, wood treatment, concrete sealing, and traditional food storage.
If you search for wood hardener, sodium silicate, water glass, preserving eggs, concrete floor hardener, or practical Amish home remedies, this conversation covers the real uses, the limits, and the mistakes to avoid. It is useful for homesteaders, woodworkers, and anyone comparing old-school methods with modern products.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00Somebody sends me this one about twice a year, and it always arrives the same way.
00:05A video about a wood hardener from the 1800s that turns cheap pine as hard as white oak,
00:12cost almost nothing, and got taken off the shelf so somebody could sell you a bottle instead.
00:18The stuff is real. It is called sodium silicate, and the old name for it is water glass,
00:25and I have a jug of it in the barn right now.
00:28So I am not here to tell you it does not exist.
00:31I am here because every account of it I have ever watched gets three things wrong,
00:37leaves out the one fact that would stop you ruining your tools,
00:41and never once tells you the jobs it is actually good for.
00:46There are three of those, and I will give you all three before the end,
00:50and I will tell you plainly that not one of them is the job you came in here wanting.
00:55Start with what it is. Sand, melted together with soda, dissolved in water. It pours like thin
01:04syrup, and it is clear, and it has no smell. You brush it onto bare wood, and it does not
01:10sit on
01:11top the way a varnish does. It soaks in. Two or three millimeters, call it a tenth of an inch,
01:17carried into the cells the way water goes up a wick. Then the water leaves it, and the carbon dioxide
01:24out of the air gets at what is left, and it sets. What you have afterward is a layer of
01:31mineral grown
01:32inside the wood, down to about the depth of a thumbnail. I gathered the whole of it into a book
01:38at EliasYoder.com. The book is the long version. If you want it, it is there. I will not mention
01:46it again.
01:47That part is true, and it is worth knowing. That shell is harder than the pine was. It will take
01:55a knock
01:55that would have dented the board. It slows a flame down considerably, and fungus has a poor time getting
02:02started in it. Now the first thing they get wrong, and it is the one in every title. It does
02:09not make
02:09pine as strong as oak. It cannot. Hardness and strength are two different properties, and people
02:17use the words as though they were one. Hardness is what a surface does when you press a steel ball
02:24into it. Strength is what a board does when you put weight across the middle of it and ask it
02:30to hold.
02:31A tenth of an inch of mineral on the outside does nothing at all for the second one. Lay a
02:37treated pine
02:38joist across a span, and it will sag the same day and break on the same load as the one
02:44you did not
02:45treat, because the inside of that board, which is the part doing the work, has never been touched.
02:52Oak is not better than pine on the surface. Oak is better all the way through, and nothing you brush
02:59on from outside will reach all the way through. The second thing they get wrong is the price.
03:06Free, the titles say. It is about $25 a gallon where I buy it, and the same videos that call
03:13it free
03:14will tell you the price out loud ten minutes later and not notice. And the third thing is the numbers,
03:21and this is the one I want to be careful about. Every one of those accounts gives you figures.
03:27Hardness went from this to that. A study from such and such a year. A government laboratory report.
03:34I went looking for those reports, and I will tell you what I found, which is that not one of
03:40them
03:40comes with a number you could use to go and read it. No author, no title, no volume. So I
03:48am not going
03:48to repeat them to you, because a number I cannot trace is worse than no number at all. I can
03:55tell you
03:55what the stuff does because I have used it. I cannot tell you by how much, and neither can anybody
04:01else who
04:02has been passing those figures around. What I can tell you about is a step on a granary, and why
04:09my
04:09grandfather let me waste a summer on it. I was fourteen, and the bottom step up to the granary door
04:15had worn through in the middle, the way a step does when three generations have put a boot in the
04:21same
04:22four inches of it. He told me to replace it, and he left me to it. The oak was stacked
04:28in the shed,
04:28and I knew without being told that it was not for me, so I took a length of pine off
04:34the rack.
04:35I knew pine was soft. I was not stupid about it, so I did what a boy does, which is
04:41try to make up the
04:42difference with effort. I gave that step three coats of porch paint and let each one dry hard, and I
04:49put
04:50it in, and I was pleased with myself all the way through harvest. It was through again by the following
04:56August. Not worn. Through. A hollow in the middle of it you could lay two fingers in. My grandfather
05:03did not say a word about the paint. He took the ruined step out, and he set it on the
05:09bench beside
05:09the old one I had thrown in the scrap pile, and he told me to look at the two ends.
05:14The old step was
05:16pine. The same pine, off the same rack, probably cut from the same tree. It had held for thirty years,
05:23and the one I made had held for eleven months. And the difference was that whoever laid the old one
05:30had turned it up on edge so that the boot came down across the grain instead of along it, onto
05:37the hard
05:38end of all those fibers instead of the soft side of them. That is the whole of it. Same board.
05:45Same
05:45wood. Same everything, except which way it was facing. He said one thing to me about it,
05:51and I have had thirty years to find out he was right. You do not improve a board. You improve
05:58the
05:59way you use it. Which brings me to the part nobody tells you, and if you take one thing out
06:05of this,
06:05take this one, because it will cost you money. Once that silica is in the wood, the wood is full
06:12of
06:13mineral. And mineral does to a cutting edge exactly what you would expect. A plain iron will stop
06:19cutting in two passes. A saw blade will go dull in a single cut, and it will not come back
06:26from a stone,
06:27the way a blade dulled on timber does, because you have not blunted it, you have been grinding it against
06:34rock. A chisel will roll its edge over. I have done this, and I was not pleased about it. So
06:41the rule is
06:42simple, and it is absolute. Every cut, every joint, every bit of shaping, and all of your sanding gets
06:51done first. The treatment goes on last, when the piece is finished, and you are never going to put a
06:57tool on it again. Treat it before you are done, and you will pay for it in blades. And the
07:04same reason
07:04gives you the health side of it. Sanding treated wood puts silica into the air. That is not sawdust.
07:12Keep a proper respirator on for that, and do it outdoors, and better still, arrange your work so you
07:20never have to sand it at all. Three more limits, quickly, because they decide whether this is any use
07:26to you. It will not take a finish, and it will not take glue. You have sealed the wood with
07:33mineral,
07:34so stain will not go in evenly and will blotch. Most film finishes will not grip properly, and a glue
07:42joint on a treated face is not a joint you should trust. Do your glue up first, always. It will
07:50not
07:50move with the seasons. Wood swells and shrinks all its life, and glass does not, so the shell and the
07:58board underneath spend every year pulling against one another. On anything that gets wet and dries out
08:05again, you will get fine crazing and shallow cracks in a few seasons. It is not a failure, exactly. It
08:13is
08:13the nature of putting something rigid on something that breathes, and it cannot be mended invisibly.
08:20Once it is set, it is set, and a repair in the middle of a treated surface will always show.
08:27Decide
08:28before you start that you can live with the look of it. People ask me whether it will fix rot,
08:34so let me
08:34settle that one as well. It will not. If a board has gone soft and punky, then a fungus has
08:42eaten the
08:42cellulose out of it, and brushing mineral into what is left gives you a hard shell around a hollow.
08:49The structure is gone, and no liquid puts it back. There is a product made for that job, a consolidant,
08:57which is a resin that soaks into decayed fiber and binds it together so you have something solid to
09:03fill against. That is a different product doing different work, and it is the right thing to reach
09:09for when the job is rot. And on anything carrying weight, a sill, a joist, a post, the answer to
09:18rot
09:18is not a bottle at all. You cut back to sound wood, and you put new timber in. I have
09:25watched a man
09:26consolidate a porch post instead, and I have seen what became of the porch. Then there is handling it,
09:33and I want to be plain here rather than brisk. This is a caustic alkali, not a strong one, but
09:40strong
09:40enough that it belongs in the same mental box as drain cleaner, and not in the box with linseed oil.
09:47On skin it feels soapy and slick, and then it stings, and left on it will burn. On an eye
09:55it is a good
09:55deal more serious than that, and the thing about an alkali in an eye is that it can keep going
10:01without
10:02hurting much at first, which is how people wait too long. So, sealed goggles, not glasses. Gloves. Long
10:12sleeves. Mix and brush it outdoors or with the doors open, and never spray it, because a mist of it
10:19gets
10:20into your eyes and your throat without you choosing. If it goes on your skin, wash it with a lot
10:26of
10:27running water. If any of it gets in an eye, hold that eye open and flush it with clean water
10:33for a
10:34good 15 or 20 minutes by the clock, and then get a doctor to look at it, even if it
10:40has stopped hurting.
10:42Especially if it has stopped hurting. Keep it off glass, because it etches. Keep it off aluminum,
10:49because it corrodes it. Keep it off stone and tile and brick, because it dries to a white streak you
10:57will not get back off. Never put it in with anything acid. And keep the jug where no child and
11:05no animal
11:05can reach it. Now the three jobs, and I will say again that none of them is making a pine
11:12board into an
11:13oak one. The first one is eggs, and this is the one I would not be without. Hens do not
11:21lay the same
11:22all year. They slow in the dark months, and some of them stop, and there was no shop to go
11:28to when my
11:29grandfather was a boy, so you put eggs down in the autumn to carry you to spring. Water glass is
11:36how it
11:37was done, and it still works. An egg comes out of the hen with a coating on it, and that
11:43coating is
11:43what keeps it good. So the eggs have to be unwashed, which means your own or a neighbor's, and not
11:51a
11:51carton off a shelf, because those have been washed. Fresh, a few days old at the outside. Clean, which is
12:00not the same as washed, so leave the dirty ones for the kitchen. And not one of them cracked, because
12:07one cracked egg will spoil the crock. One part of the sodium silicate to 10 or 11 parts of water.
12:16Boil the water first and let it go cold, so that you are not putting anything live into the crock
12:22with
12:22your eggs. Stir it together, set your eggs in, point down, pour it over until they are covered by a
12:30couple
12:30of inches, lid it loosely, and put it somewhere cool and dark. A cellar, a back pantry, anywhere that
12:38stays cool and does not freeze. Any vessel that does not mind an alkali will do, so a stoneware crock,
12:47a food grade plastic bucket, a wide glass jar. Not metal, and above all, not aluminum.
12:55Five gallons of solution will put down a great many dozen, and you can keep adding eggs as they
13:02come in through the autumn, so long as everything stays under the surface. And when you take one out,
13:08there is a check worth the four seconds it takes. Set it in a bowl of water. If it lies
13:15down on its
13:16side, it is good. If it stands up on end, it is older and still sound for baking. If it
13:23floats,
13:24it goes on the compost, and you do not crack it indoors. They will keep through the winter,
13:30and a good deal longer than that. Take one out, rinse it under the tap, and use it.
13:37Two things to know. The whites thin out as the months go by, so they fry and bake perfectly well,
13:45and they will not whip up for a meringue by spring. And if you boil one, put a pin through
13:52the shell at the
13:52fat end first, or start it in cold water, because a stored egg out of the crock will crack in
14:00a rolling
14:00boil. The second job is a working floor or a step you will never finish and never sand. A granary
14:09floor. A feed room. A shop floor. The bottom tread on the barn stairs. Bear wood in a place where
14:19you
14:19want it to shrug off dents and sparks, where nobody is going to ask it to look pretty, and where
14:25you
14:25will never come back with a sander. Take it to the condition you want, then treat it, then leave it
14:31alone for the rest of its life. In that one situation, this stuff earns its $25, and it does
14:39something no varnish will do, which is make a cheap softwood floor stop denting. And I will tell you
14:46what my grandfather would have added. Before you treat that step, turn it on edge. Do that, and you
14:53may find you do not need the jug at all. The end grain video has the rest of that in
14:59it, and I will
14:59not go over it twice. The third job is not wood at all, and it is the one that surprises
15:06people.
15:07Concrete. If you have a cellar floor or a shop floor that chalks, that gives off that fine gray dust
15:15forever no matter how often you sweep it. Water glass is the proper cure for that, and it always
15:21has been. It goes into the surface, reacts with the lime in the concrete, and hardens the top of it
15:27into something that stops shedding. It is sold by the drum for exactly this, and has been for a century.
15:35Sweep it clean, wet the floor, brush it on thin, keep it damp for a while, then rinse off whatever
15:43has
15:43not gone in. You will get a floor you can sweep without raising a cloud. Two warnings on that one.
15:51It is slick while it is wet, so do not start on a floor you have to walk across until
15:56it has dried
15:57and been rinsed off. And it will not mend a slab that is cracked or crumbling, because it hardens a
16:04surface and it does not repair concrete. A floor that is coming apart is a different problem with a
16:11different answer. So that is the three. Eggs in a crock, a floor you will never refinish, and a concrete
16:19slab that dusts. And as for the idea that somebody buried it, nobody buried anything. Sodium silicate
16:27is a bulk industrial chemical. It goes out by the rail car for concrete and for foundry work and for
16:34paper
16:35and for sealing things, and you can order a drum of it tomorrow from the same people who have always
16:40sold it. There is no secret in it anywhere. What there is, is four conditions attached to it. Do all
16:48your cutting first. Do not expect a finish to stick. Expect it to craze. Wear the goggles. And a thing
16:56with
16:57four conditions on it does not make a good promise, and a promise is what gets passed around. So the
17:03conditions fall off, and what is left traveling from person to person is the one line that sounds like
17:09magic, which is the line about the oak. Nobody hid the method. The method simply got shorter every
17:16time it was repeated, until what reached you was the only part of it that was not true.
17:22I think about that step more than you would expect. Three coats of good paint on the wrong face of
17:28a board,
17:28and a summer of being pleased with myself, and eleven months later a hole in it. The man who
17:35laid the one before me had no paint and no jug of anything. He had the same pine I had,
17:41and he turned
17:41it ninety degrees. You do not improve a board. You improve the way you use it. Tell me something in
17:48the comments. What is the oldest thing on your place that is still doing its job, and do you know
17:54why it has
17:55lasted, whether it was the material or just somebody putting it in properly? I would rather hear about a
18:01hinge or a gate post than anything expensive. And tell me whether you have ever put eggs down for a
18:07winter, because I suspect more of you have than will admit it. Next time I want to get into putting
18:13an edge back on an axe and on a scythe, since I have been on about ruining blades for ten
18:18minutes,
18:19and I have owed you that one since the Rust video. I am Elias Yoder. I farm in Lancaster County,
18:26Pennsylvania. There is nothing wrong with a cheap board, and there is nothing wrong with wanting it
18:31to last. Only understand that the lasting comes out of how you set it, and how you use it, and
18:38not out
18:38of anything you can buy by the gallon. The people who built this country with their hands knew that,
18:44and we are only just starting to remember it.