Don’t inhale the coco
I was messing around with some cocobolo this week. It’s crazy stuff. It’s normally
black and reddish-orange, like this. It’s gorgeous and striking. But it gets wierd. When you finish sanding it, the red parts are suddenly yellow. And I don’t mean “it gets slightly more yellow”, I mean post-it note, bug-lamp yellow.
Then it gets wierder. If you get any water or mineral oil on it, POOF. Instant red-orange again. If you let it sit there for a while, it will still get back to red-orange, only over the course of hours.
The strangitude doesn’t stop when you cut this stuff. As soon as I cut into it, I smelled this wierd, distinctive odor of cinnamon and cloves. It smelled good enough that I wanted to lean closer and catch a closer whiff, but that seemed unwise since the tablesaw was still running.
The sawdust is orange and should be treated like radioactive waste. Basically, most people have an allergic reaction to cocobolo dust (not the solid wood) that’s pretty similar to poison ivy. Ug. Further, it’s a sensitizer. That means that even if you don’t get nailed by it the first few times you’re around it, the fifth or tenth or whatever time you’ll find yourself instantly overwhelmed by just a speck.
Finally, the stuff is oily. You have to wipe it down with mineral spirits before gluing or else the glue won’t stick, and you’ll have to use something like Gorilla Glue anyway. When you’re wiping it down, you can literally see the orange oils on the rag.
On the plus side, the stuff is rock-hard and crazy tough. The natural oils protect it from water, which is why they use it for knife handles. You could probably make an outdoor deck out of it if you really had money to burn. Heck, these people make flooring out of it. Actually, that might be worth ordering from–get a 2′ piece, cut it in half, glue it up using the handy T&G that are already in place, and voila.
One other neat thing about it is it doesn’t actually require any finish. You’d be insane to stain it, of course, but you can actually polish it to a high sheen without the application of any other finish. Many people do it with just a coat of wax. One catch, though: the darkening process I mentioned earlier never completely stops, and it will eventually turn black from UV exposure. A UV-blocking lacquer should solve this.
Pick up some cocobolo, a full face respirator, a new dust collector, and a hermetically sealed bunny suit. You’ll thank me for it.
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