Based on their age, there are a couple of different types of coconuts: jelly coconuts and dry coconuts. Jelly coconuts are the young, green ones that have lots of the sweet coconut water in them, but almost none of the coconut meat that people grate and use in candies, to make coconut milk, etc. The dry coconuts are the ones that we as Americans are more familiar with, they are what we think of as a coconut, with a fibrous, brown, hard outer shell. Once they are cracked open they a have a little coconut water in them but are mostly meat. After the meat is pried out of them, the hard, woody shell can be used to make nice cups and bowls.
Generally people just chop them with a machete or bash them against a rock to get to the meat out the dry coconuts, but if a person, like me, wants to make something nice out of the complete shell and not just the shattered fragments then a little more care needs to be taken with them. A stiff, fine-tooth handsaw works nicely to cut off the tops exactly where you want the rim of your cup or bowl to be. Next, the meat of the coconut needs to be carefully extracted without cracking the rim of the shell. Once the meat is out I take a wire brush and remove all the excess woody material on the outside of the shell, which also save s me a ton of time in the next step… sand papering. Just like any other piece of wood a coconut shell needs to be sand papered smooth before applying any type of finish.
The final trick in making coconut cups and bowls is in making some kind of pedestal that allow the round-bottomed cup or bowl to stand upright. I have yet to perfect this, but in the attached pictures you’ll see where I’m going with it.
Matt
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