Anyone used seasoned Olive wood?

[Cheesy Blender]

Good Evening,

i wondered, has anyone any experience of carving simple utencils from olive wood?

the reason i ask, i saw some reasonably priced chopping boards in an outlet type place at the weekend and it got me thinking, its a beautiful looking grain and i,ve never used any.

i can imagine its quite hard going , but i have some good quality carving tools and think that a couple of spatulas or salad sporky type things would be a nice project,

i,m no stranger to the odd blister (insert smut if you must)

but just wondered if it was worth the effort and the 4 or 5 pounds for potentially buggering up a perfectly good chopping board.

 

[John Fenna]

I have used Olive wood, from charity shop bargain chopping boards to handle knives but not for spoonage - but if I found a good supply I would!
I love that wood!

 

[Cheesy Blender]

ok,

thank you for the info John,

i think i'm going to go for it!

i might even put pictures up of my efforts

 

[Gailainne]

I did exactly that, bought two different thickness cheese boards, as you said the grain is amazing, it seems to carve and sand well, I certainly got a really good finish on the knife handles I've made from it. One thing tho because its not stabilised, you may have issues with cracks developing, problem is the best grain (I think) is where branches are developing which looks like a weak area, one of the scales on my necker started a crack but I just put in some epoxy to seal it.

 

[John Fenna]

I did exactly that, bought two different thickness cheese boards, as you said the grain is amazing, it seems to carve and sand well, I certainly got a really good finish on the knife handles I've made from it. One thing tho because its not stabilised, you may have issues with cracks developing, problem is the best grain (I think) is where branches are developing which looks like a weak area, one of the scales on my necker started a crack but I just put in some epoxy to seal it.

I have never used stabilized wood on any knives - just well seasoned
One where I used Teak and Iron wood needs occassional sanding as the rounds of wood shrink and expand at very different rates!

 

[2trapper]

very good wood. Here in Italy it's widely used for spoons and spatulae. Very long lasting but quite hard to carve

 

[Perrari]

Used it for knife scales. Lovely grain, and easy to work. £4-5 for an olive wood blank sounds pretty good to me.