#fordite

I love the way people will make art out of anything.

Also, these are beautiful.

This is Fordite, made of layers of car paint.

Source

And these are made of surfboard glassing waste:

so I was reading the wikipedia article on fordite, because I think I remember seeing a post on it and I thought it was cool

and it's totally cool!

but then

Was fiddling with my Detroit Agate (aka Fordite) and decided to take a bad picture.

Fordite is an artifact of an earlier time, a man-made gemstone whose process is gone and will never be again. Up until the early 1980's, cars were painted with sprayers, and the rooms where this occurred were covered in layer after layer of color. Eventually, these would be peeled up and discarded. Some folks would collect the discards, cut, and polish them to bring out the layers and colors, like an agate stone.

Real experts can look at a piece of Fordite and tell you what factory it came from based on the color patterns, and some folks classify each automaker's castoff this way ("Jeepite", for example, often has bright yellow layers because it was a popular color for the Wrangler line).