Post #559878 by Bay Park Buzzy on Thu, Oct 14, 2010 5:48 PM

I've seen that variation before, but i think the one I saw was painted with some color...

The eyes on the Ku and his weapon are noticeably different than on the more common ones.

Most of the following is a rambling guess, and should be considered opinion, rather than fact:

If you look at the other common black version, you'll notice that it looks like it was carved as a hapawood piece with the wood grain in it. CCJ's did that with a lot of their pieces: Black wood and brown lava. That one looks like it was originally carved as a lava piece without the wood grain. I've noticed that with some pieces, they slightly changed a feature or two on a subsequent recarved version. On some, it looks like they corrected a part of the sculpt because it was causing problems when it was cast from the mold.

I think that during the 30+ years of CocoJoes they tried every type of resin available. Usually, the older pieces were heavier and more dense. It seems that some of the newer pieces are the ones that are more prone to bending and are lighter in composition. Those newer ones also look like they were cast in white, and then painted or dipped in something to give them the color. when those crack, they expose a white core. The older pieces were black/brown throughout.

The '90 copyright can tell you the piece you have is made after 1990, but doesn't necessarily mean that the sculpt is from 1990. There were several older pieces that had no copyright date on them, but then on later productions of the piece the copyright was added.

Buzzy Out!