The Great British Fordite: A Colour Story Hiding on Our Own Doorstep

Why the most American of materials might just have a very British chapter waiting to be written — one turned right here in the West Midlands.

If you've followed my pens for any length of time, you'll know I have a soft spot for materials with a story baked into them. Wood from a Namibian carpenter's offcuts. Flooring rescued from a house in El Calafate. Timber salvaged from an abandoned farmhouse on the Colorado plains. I can't help it — I'd rather turn a blank that remembers where it came from than one that arrived shrink-wrapped and anonymous.

Which brings me to fordite, and a question that's been quietly nagging at me.

First, for the uninitiated

Fordite isn't a stone. It's hardened car paint — and it's one of the most gorgeous accidents in industrial history. Back when cars were spray-painted by hand, the overspray that missed the bodywork built up in colourful layers on the racks and skids in the paint booths. Every pass added another stripe. The bodies then went into the ovens to bake, and the overspray baked right along with them — sometimes a hundred times over. Do that for months and you get a dense, layered cake of enamel, every band a different colour the factory happened to be spraying that week.

Eventually it got too thick and had to be chipped off and thrown away. Then some sharp-eyed soul noticed the chunks looked like psychedelic agate, and a whole craft was born. Cut and polished, fordite becomes these swirling, banded, impossibly vivid slices of colour. It's also known, rather poetically, as **Detroit agate** — because that's where nearly all of it comes from.

And there's the rub

It's an almost entirely American story

Ford. Corvette. Jeep. Kenworth trucks. Even, delightfully, the paint from garbage trucks (which produces some of the most beautiful material going — I've turned it, and nobody ever guesses). The whole vocabulary of fordite is American: Bowling Green, Toledo, River Rouge, Motor City. The good vintage stuff was chipped from American booths decades ago and has been hoarded in American garages ever since. When the industry switched to electrostatic painting in the 1980s — where the paint is magnetically drawn to the body, leaving almost no overspray — the supply simply stopped. What exists is all there is.

So when a fellow maker asked me recently whether fordite *only* comes from the States, I found myself genuinely curious. Because here's the thing: **we painted cars too.** For the best part of a century. In vast numbers. Using exactly the same hand-spray-and-bake process that made every scrap of American fordite.

Where's ours?

The bit that made me sit up

It turns out British fordite absolutely exists — and by the accounts of the veteran cutters who've handled it, it's rather special. Where a lot of American material is all opaque colour, British specimens are described as having metallics *and* a genuine translucency to some of the layers. A slightly more refined look, if you like. Very us.

And then I looked at a map, and had a proper moment.

Because I'm in the **West Midlands**. And a short drive from where I turn my pens sits **Longbridge** — Austin, BMC, British Leyland, Rover, the birthplace of the original Mini, once employing twenty-five thousand people. Down the road there's **Cowley** in Oxford — Morris, Pressed Steel. Jaguar. Rover. Vauxhall. These were the cathedrals of British motoring, and every one of them ran paint booths through the exact era that produces fordite. The colours of a nation's cars — the racing greens, the period browns and beiges nobody remembers fondly, the bright BMC blues — all of it was going up in overspray, layer on layer, year after year.

Somewhere, in principle, that history hardened into the same banded material that Americans wear as jewellery and I turn into pens. Except almost nobody has ever cut British fordite as a proper, traded, provenanced material. There's no established supply. No catalogue. No "Longbridge grade."

Which, if you're the sort of person who likes a material with a story, is not a problem. It's an invitation.

Where this might go

I'm not going to pretend I've cracked it. Sourcing genuine, documented British paint slag is going to take exactly the kind of legwork I enjoy — conversations with classic-car restorers, old body shops, industrial-heritage folk, the people who kept a chunk of the old plant because they couldn't bear to skip it. It has to be *verifiable*; a story is only worth telling if it's true, and there's plenty of dressed-up resin out there pretending to be something it isn't.

But imagine it. A pen turned from paint that once belonged to a Longbridge Mini. Or a Cowley Morris. British motoring history, layer by layer, spun into something you can hold in your hand and write with — turned a few miles from where those cars rolled off the line. Every band a colour that once drove down a British road.

That's not a material you order from a website. That's a story worth chasing.

If you're reading this and you know where the old booths went, or you've got a dusty chunk of layered paint in a shed that nobody's ever been able to explain — I would genuinely love to hear from you. This might be the start of something.

*Watch this space. Or better yet, drop me a line.*

Mike turns bespoke pens from materials gathered on his travels and closer to home, each one carrying a little of where it came from