From a cheeseboard?

I found this highly figured Olivewood cheeseboard at Homegoods for $14.99. I can cut ten blanks out of it. The Concava is the first one I made from it.

Wow great score!

What a find!

Good deal, nice pen

I've found these several times, good score.

Excellent!

I try to get to HG every month or so to check for them. I add a cheese slicing wire to them and can charge more than 3x the cost of board. They are usually the first ones sold.

There is a hardwood dealer nearby that usually has a few factory-second white oak cutting boards that can be recycled to make other items. I've also found some hard maple cutting boards in an end-of-season clearance sale in a gift shop in a resort area. In either case, I got great timber at a very good price.

The one thing to worry about is whether the original item had been finished - often, treenware is finished using a 'food safe' mineral-oil/beeswax combination that could be incompatible with whatever finish you might want to use on the item you create using that wood. It's ok as long as you turn away enough of the surface to get past the finish - and fortunately, those 'food-safe' finishes don't penetrate all that deeply into the wood.

There is a turner who had a You-Tube channel who specialized in items made using recycled wood. As I recall, most of the wood he used came from hardwood furniture that was being thrown away and that he retrieved from the side of the road on garbage day.

1.49 per blank, can't beat that. Pen looks beautiful.

I have picked up a few of these also. The boards I've found tend to be full of cracks from improper drying or storage. Some are obvious from the surface and have been filled. Others are internal and don't appear until the pen is turned. At that price I don't expect much. There are always several good pens in them. In my experience, the better the figure, the worse the cracks. Plot your course based on the visible cracks and hope for the best!