How to tell the difference between Catalin and Bakelite?
Tough one that, I will try to explain why. Bakelite and Catalin are both tradenames for early thermosetting plastics based on formaldehydes. Bakelite was manufactured by a US company, Catalin was manufactured in direct competition by a UK company. Actually the tradenames covered a range of different plastics: phenol formaldehyde, urea formaldehyde and melamine formaldehyde and don’t refer to a specific compund. To complicate things further each of these plastics could be compounded differently by adding (or not adding) certain additional ingredients (called ‘fillers’ in the business, carbon black being the stereotypical example, added to increase strength and lower cost, but resulting in a darker coloured material). Right from the start plastics were tailored to a certain degree to get the kind of properties and cost wanted. However, all is not lost there are some general differences as follows: Phenol formaldehyde is always relatively dark in colour, usually dark orange, tan, brown or
