Part 6: Where's my raygun?

Things are starting to shape up the way I'd envisioned. It's starting to look very Buck Rogers. I'm having a hard time envisioning the headstock now that everything is so 'automotive' in design. The National New Yorker headstock (see Part 4) just doesn't seem right anymore. But we'll see. Perhaps I can modify that design to work with this shape.


So, I went with the cocobolo as my accent wood. I made the second set of wings and a stripe on the top face out of the wood blank I purchased. I'm also going to make a hand-rest out of the remaining cocobolo (I just love that word) that will be placed right above the pickup. I'm going to go all super fancy and make it removable too. Router - don't fail me now!


I went with the cocobolo (see, isn't it just fun to read?) because it had the nicest grain pattern. There are browns and reds and blonds and even some purple all mottled together in these tiny pieces of wood. Cocobolo is a central/south american wood that has many of the same visual characteristics of Brazilian Rosewood but differs quite a bit in other qualities. Cocobolo is almost waterproof (some samples don't even float in water), it has a lot of natural oils in the wood. So finishing this guitar is going to be a trip. Some sites I read suggest just hand rubbing the wood after sanding it. It won't need any further protection. It's supposed to polish up quite nicely.


I have a lot, a lot, a lot of sanding and scraping in my future. I was able to rough shape the second set of wings with a combination of a rasp and heavy duty sandpaper. I was originally going to use a sanding drum on my power drill but the cocobolo just gummed it up too fast to use for more than a few minutes at a time.


Sanding is a trip with this stuff. I bought decent grade sandpaper and started at 60 grit just to get things moving. It is slow going and the sandpaper is constantly getting gummed up. I've also been told that this stuff is pretty hard on your power tools - so we'll see how often I use this.


But I gotta say - even in its rough form - I love the way this stuff looks. It might not have been the best pairing with walnut (as you can see from the pictures it's hard to see where all of the cocobolo is. But I'm hoping that this is because I hit the whole piece with a heavy coat of mineral spirits prior to shooting these pictures.