FORDITE - a man-made discard !

To answer a couple inquiries, although I have not actually used any in jewelry, I do have a couple sample pieces of Fordite. However I have seen none on the market for a while, especially pieces large enough to put into jewelry. Check with the Fordite web-site as I noticed they do have some jewelry available. It is sometimes amazing what mother-nature can do with stuff that man throws away or discards as useless junk or no longer usable.

Fordite is a unique automotive enamel material. Originally in the Ford Motor Plants the layered automotive paint slag "rough" was made incidentally by the now extinct practice of hand spray-painting multiples of production cars in big paint rooms of the automobile factories. The oversprayed paint in the painting bays gradually built up on the tracks and skids that the car frames were painted on. Over time, many colorful layers built up there. These layers were hardened repeatedly in the ovens that the car bodies went into to cure the paint. Some of these deeper layers were even baked 100 times. Eventually, the paint build-up would become obstructing, or too thick and heavy, and had to be removed. So it was chipped off and thrown out behind the plants in slag piles to do whatever old paint does in nature as seen below.

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Some of the workers with an eye for beauty realized that this unique byproduct was worth salvaging. It had already been super-cured, patterned like psychedelic agate, and could be cut and polished with relative ease! As word got around about this remarkable material, rock hounds started showing up at auto factories, offering to help remove that problematic paint slag! Sadly, the techniques that produced this great rough years ago, are no longer in practice. Cars are now painted by way of an electrostatic process that essentially magnetizes the enamels to the car bodies. This leaves little, or no overspray. The old factory methods that created this incredible material are long gone. Thus the Fordite “mines” are dry.

It is possible through some dealers to still acquire pieces of Fordite, both the "US" and "British" versions. You might also look under "Motor Agate", "Detroit Agate" and sometimes it is called "Gordianite". Do not confuse Fordite with "Bowlerine", another man-made material where old bowling balls are cut up, polished and being used as stones in jewelry. Fordite.com has identified 4 basic types of Fordite -

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Type 1: Separated Colors - Regular grey banding of primer layers between color layers.
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Type 2: Color on Color - Opaques and metallics. Limited colors. Small parts collection.
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Type 3: Color on Color - Drippy, with multiple colors and layers. Psychedelic lace and orbital patterns, with occasional surface channeling.
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Type 4: Color on Color - Opaques and metallics, with bleeding, thin color layers, sometimes containing pitted layers.
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Then you have to seperarte which is Great Britian, Detroit or Ohio versions. Most "US" is Type 1, while the "British" is Type 2 and 3. And to make things interesting, there has been a Type 3 version found at a GM plant in Wisconsin.

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Thanks to the folks at www.fordite.com for their information and pictures. Some pictures are of material we have acquired.
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