Fordite questions

[The bead box man]

I saw this material on ebay and some of the sellers mentioned that it has been used for beads. I wonder if anyone here has worked with it? Can you drill through it? Most of the sellers are selling cabachon type material. For those that do not know what fordite is I copied this from one of the sellers:

Fordite cabochon, known locally as Detroit Agate. Not an agate at all, though, merely a happy accident! This material was created many years ago at the Ford Rouge Plant just outside of Detroit, Michigan. Layer upon layer, paint over-spray built up on metal racks that transported new car bodies through the paint shop, and into the oven, where each coat was baked hard.

163958

163957

163956

WHAT IS FORDITE?.
Dagenham Fordite also known as Dagenham agate (or in the U.S. Detroit agate) is a very rare and special material that was a bi product of the process of spraying multiple units in the spray booths at the Ford plant in Dagenham England many years ago. It was made from the overspray of auto paint that accumulated and built up on certain pieces of equipment in the spray booths over a long period of time. Each layer being baked many times over, producing the rough that these little gems are made from. They are very light in weight and hardwearing.

It has taken me years to acquire some of this extremely rare material.

My source Paul, ("Mr. Fordite" - fordite-uk on ebay) discovered this material back in the 70's. There does not seem to be any other source of Dagenham fordite existing. He may have been the only one collecting and working with this material in the UK. He also gave it the Dagenham tag to distinguish it from American material. Paul's work and fordite in general is very popular in the UK and in America. His cabs were featured in "BEAD" magazine issue 3.Fordite was featured in The Times magazine last year. "The rarest gemstone in the world".

[earlbacher]

it looks like it cold be 'cold worked' drilled.. ground and polished...

interesting idea...

[princessb]

Cool looking!

xoxo

[KEW]

It's wonderful!

[delinquent beader]

It is wonderful but contact Gary Wilson (he's a great gem artist and carries Fordite- google him/ or ask Barbara Becker Simon for his addy - she gets stones from him). It is enamel paint from the Ford plants. Correct on the working with it but I've had friends who have tried to bezel it and had pieces crack on them. One was a very experienced metalsmith and took no chances. Just might have had a pre-existing hairline she missed. Ask some of the lapidary guys.

[ejralph]

I saw some of this at a Bead fair in the UK, and the guy told us it was a stone that he worked.

Didn't ring true at the time, so glad to know finally what it is. Don't know if the guy selling it was just being ultra ironic in telling us it was a stone. If so, it went way over my head.

Had I known what it really was though I would have bought some from him. He had no other people at the stall, so had the perfect chance to talk up the material and tell me all about it. He should have done, I would have been way more interested had I known!

Emma

[Aretz]

I work in an auto plant. This makes me wonder if I could possibly get my hands on something similar by pestering the folks in the paint shop...

[Karen Hardy]

I work in an auto plant. This makes me wonder if I could possibly get my hands on something similar by pestering the folks in the paint shop...

No time like the present to find out! You could also work
in cahoots with them - set aside a piece of wood or plastic, and
have them give it a thick "spritz" of paint every time they do a car.

[Aretz]

Actually, once I stopped and thought about it, I doubt I could get any. It probably doesn't even exist, one reason being cleanliness, and the other involving the "waste" of paint that didn't make it onto the car.

You have to put on a nylon clean suit, tie up any loose hair and walk through an "air shower" to clean off any dust/dirt/clothes lint/dandruff/whatever before you're even allowed in the paint shop. It's like a laboratory clean room in there. Purposely sticking something in there is out of the question; I know for a fact they wouldn't let me.

Paint overspray probably doesn't even exist anymore. The whole process is automated. Machines fill "cups" on the sprayers with the exact amount needed for the car. The robots paint it, then the cups on the sprayers are "flushed" in preparation for the next car. They don't do batches of bodies in one color; frequently, it's one color on one body, then another color on the next. The car bodies are electrostatically charged so they actually attract the paint spray like a magnet.
There is very little overspray, if any at all. It's considered wasteful, and the automotive market is so tight (and was before the economy crapped out) that any improvement, reuse of material, or reduction of waste, no matter how slight, is seriously considered.

The attitude towards waste is probably one reason the Japanese automakers (mine being one of them) are doing better than the domestics and other foreign makers. They were worried about reducing waste and keeping costs down even before it became a political, socioeconomic and environmental issue, while a lot of other companies were just cruising along thinking "Things are good, why change anything?"

If you want Fordite, I suggest you get it now, because I seriously doubt the conditions that led to its accidental creation exist at any automotive factory these days.