Less Evasive Concrete Repair | Reducing Silica Dust

Less Evasive Concrete Repair

Reducing worker exposure to silica dust is an OSHA and job site priority.

“Workers may be exposed to dangerous levels of silica dust when cutting, drilling, grinding, or otherwise disturbing materials that contain silica. These materials and tasks are common on construction jobs. Breathing that dust can lead to serious, often fatal illnesses.” The Center for Construction Research and Training. Click here to learn how to work safely with silica.

Core sample of Roadware 10 Minute Concrete Mender™ repair shown under UV light.

With Roadware 10 Minute Concrete Mender™, you can make excellent crack and spall repairs with much less cutting and grinding.  Standard preparation for most concrete repair products calls for invasive actions from square cutting and removal to deep cutting, grinding and sandblasting. Aggressive preparation is necessary for standard repair material like epoxy and polyureas. They are too thick to penetrate and bond to compromised concrete surfaces. Roadware 10 Minute Concrete Mender™ has an extremely low viscosity of less than 8cps when applied with a surface tension one third of water. Concrete Mender™ can penetrate and bond concrete surfaces where other materials will fail.

Less grinding and cutting means less dust to mitigate.

Many concrete crack repairs can be made with Concrete Mender™ with just a light scoring with variable speed diamond grinder. This reduces dust production by nearly 70% over conventional methods.

In some situations, cracks can be repaired directly with only a shop vacuum used to remove dirt and dust. Roadware’s needle tip application mixers are great for getting Concrete Mender™ into small cracks in fissures.

Roadware 10 Minute Concrete Mender™ needle tip application.

A wire wheel can be used for preparing cracks and spalls. We recommend using a variable speed grinder with a twisted wire wheel. This generates less dust than diamond blades and still does a good job preparing the crack for a Concrete Mender repair.

A wire wheel in a variable speed grinder generates less dust than a diamond cutting blade.

After the crack or spall is repaired, grinding and buffing to make the repair flush can be made using wet methods in just 10 minutes after application when using Concrete Mender™.  Other low dust methods include razor scrapping and dustless grinding equipment.

Wet and damp grinding and polishing reduces dust generation.

Razor scrapping is a low-dust method of finishing Concrete Mender™ repairs.

Whenever cutting or grinding concrete, have a plan to keep harmful dust away from workers and bystanders. Using Roadware 10 Minute Concrete Mender™ with these minimal evasive techniques can help keep dust exposure to a minimum.