Every other section of this site follows the compound backwards — to the plant that blended it, the worker who pressed it, the shop that bought it. This section follows it forwards, to the thing it actually became.

That matters because the compound was never the point. Asbestos-phenolic was sold by the pound to be moulded into something else, and the people who spent careers near the finished part vastly outnumber the people who ever saw a bag of compound. An electrician racking circuit breakers for thirty years, a mechanic replacing distributor caps, a sailor working a switchboard, a machinist cutting laminate stock — none of them worked in the plastics trade, and none of them would ever think to search for “phenolic molding compound.”

They would search for the part.

The product families

  • Electrical apparatus — circuit breakers, switchgear arc chutes, panelboards and load centers, terminal blocks, motor starters and contactors, transformer components. The largest single application, and the one with the deepest documentary record.
  • Automotive and friction — distributor caps and rotors, ignition and transmission components, and the separately-loaded friction materials: brake linings, pads and clutch facings.
  • Consumer and appliance (in preparation) — cookware and iron handles, toaster and small-appliance bodies, telephone housings, radio cabinets, knobs and escutcheons.
  • Defense and aerospace (in preparation) — MIL-M-14 specification components, ablative and rocket-nozzle materials, aircraft and missile parts.

Why the part is the identification key

Asbestos-phenolic parts are difficult to identify by eye. They are hard, dark brown or black, glossy, heavy for their size, and they neither melt nor burn — but so are the glass-, cotton- and paper-filled grades that replaced them. Two things narrow it down:

Grade and file numbers. Manufacturers tracked filler type by grade. Publicly filed litigation records identify specific grade designations as asbestos-filled while others in the same product line were not, which is why grade-level identification matters more here than brand-level identification.

MIL-M-14. The 1944 military specification for thermosetting molded plastics defined 20 compound types, of which 12 were mineral-filled. Any part built to those types for a government or defense contract was specified asbestos-filled by the standard itself. Where a part carries a MIL-M-14 type designation, the specification does part of the identification work.

How to read these pages

Everything here is drawn from publicly filed litigation records and alleged witness testimony. Grade numbers, customer lists and date windows appear in these records as allegations and testimony, not as established findings, and are presented that way. Where a manufacturer’s product line included both asbestos-filled and asbestos-free grades, this site says so — the distinction is often the whole question in an individual case.

Nothing on this page identifies whether any particular part a given person handled contained asbestos. That determination depends on the grade, the date, the plant and the application, and it is the kind of question a lawyer and an industrial hygienist answer together from the specific facts.

See also: Companies & Defendants for the manufacturer breakdown, The Trade for how asbestos entered the formulation, and Worker Occupations for the jobs that handled the raw compound.