James Sutherland grew up on the water's edge near Hale'iwa, in a house with a row of coconut trees out front and a mother, Audrey Sutherland, who pioneered kayak adventuring in the Islands. The Sutherlands are a rough and ready lot, who make do, re-use, jerry-rig and, when they need something, tend to build it themselves.

So when they needed coconut or coconut milk for a recipe — Tahitian-style coconut ceviche, say, made from fresh local fish they or a friend had caught — they didn't head for Foodland. They climbed a tree, machete in hand, husked the nut on a pickax and grated the flesh with an old abalone iron Audrey had brought from the Mainland.

"You go around old plantation houses and you'll find a grater bolted to a stump and an old pickax head or stake set in concrete somewhere nearby so they'd have a permanent coconut-husking station," recalled Sutherland, a firefighter who lives in Wahiawa.

Times have changed. Many Islanders have cut down their coconut trees or have them trimmed regularly, for safety's sake. Most recipes have been converted to use "angel flake"-type coconut — dried and then sweetened — or the sugar-free dehydrated coconut you can buy in health-food stores. Coconut milk comes in cans, and there's even a "lite" version. And many people wouldn't have the faintest clue how to get to the meat or juice out of a coconut and think it takes forever.

But sweetened coconut, the most common in stores, can't be used in savory preparations. And purists like Sutherland — especially those who specialize in Polynesian, Guamanian and Southeast Asian cooking — prefer fresh coconut milk to canned.

When Sutherland wanted a coconut grater for his own house, he was unable to find anything sturdy or easy enough to use. So he built one.

Sutherland based his model on his mother's old one (which is still around the house 50 years later). It's basically a long arm with a half-circle of teeth at one end and a round, smooth wooden seat at the other. Now he's selling them at craft fairs for $75.

"It's funny. It's only the old timers who even know what it is. And most of them say 'I remember we had one like this, or Grandpa had one, and whatever happened to that?' If you have coconut trees, you had one of these," Sutherland said.

Asian and Pacific models (which you can buy in Chinatown and online for $15 to $20) often have a grating arm bolted to a paddle-shaped piece of wood, or a small bench on which you squat, with your body weight actually holding the tool in place. But Sutherland, who likes his tools built to last, found these too lightweight and prone to rust and warping, and the paddle-shaped models awkward to use. (Another version, common in Sri Lanka, resembles a lemon reamer; you bolt it to a table and operate it with a hand crank; find these online.)

For his modern-day version, Sutherland uses recycled leaf- spring steel, heavy-duty automotive steel that resists rust. A friend with the right tools helps him cut it, and he files the grating teeth to a sharp point by hand. For the round, plate-size seat, he uses a hefty slice of Norfolk pine, sanded smooth for comfort. You place the seat on a bench or chair, sit on it, fit a fresh coconut half over the grater and run the meat over the blades in a cross-hatch pattern that produces a fine-textured, fluffy coconut that is delicious to eat just as it is.

On a recent morning in his mother's back yard, Sutherland illustrated how to husk, crack, grate and milk a coconut. It took him all of 1 1/2 minutes by the clock to husk and crack the coconut; perhaps 45 minutes to grate 2 1/2 coconuts (which yielded 3 cups of meat) and another 20 minutes or so to squeeze the milk from the grated meat so he could make a lunch of poisson cru (Tahitian-style coconut ceviche).

For Sutherland, a coconut purist, the time is well-spent. He can't tolerate the sweetened, dehydrated stuff, so he always grates fresh, whether he's making poisson cru, haupia or his famous coconut-oatmeal bar cookies. And when he makes coconut milk, he doesn't use water to extract the milk from the meat, as many people do. "To me, that's diluting the coconut milk. I rely exclusively on muscle power," he said, with a laugh, showing how he wraps the fresh-grated coconut in a piece of linen, then squeezes it in his powerful hands.

The milk you get that way is so rich that it actually produces a whippable cream. This rich stuff naturally rises to the top after a couple of hours in the refrigerator and can be scooped up with a fork, then whipped with or without sugar. "The texture and flavor are wonderful on strawberries or papaya, on hot gingerbread pancakes," Sutherland said.

"I admit it's a hell of a lot of work for the amount you get," about 3/4 cup per nut, he said.

"But once you have this, you don't want to go back to canned coconut milk or that sugary stuff."