I decided to bookmatch the outer laminates of the body sandwich for two reasons.  One, it just looks beautiful when you’re working with otherworldly wood.  The second reason is a bit more left-brained.  When you bookmatch wood, you have close to (but not exactly – this is Mother Nature we’re talking about) a mirror image of wood grain.  This makes expansion and contraction a bit more predictable, or at least more-or-less uniform across the width of the guitar.  You generally get stronger construction and more consistent performance out of your instrument when the laminates are bookmatched.  These Coco Bolo laminates have been bookmatched to a thickness of 1/4”.

You never know what you’re going to get when you slice wood open… Sometimes you get a face (a wood gnome), while other times, there’s not much there at all.  When my top board was sliced open, it revealed a beautiful butterfly!  This wood is something special, and I can’t wait to see it with some sealer applied!

On a side note, we decided that the guitar would look better if the top accent laminates of Maple and Purpleheart were also bookmatched to center, along with the Coco Bolo.  Alembic sanded off the top accent laminates that were glued to the body sandwich, and they’ll apply new wood to the Coco Bolo, so the accent lines are not interrupted by the neck at the bout.  The lower accent laminates will remain as is, again to match the bottom Coco Bolo laminate (which is bookmatched, just not to center).