My first piece of advice is, get some closed up pics of the olive wood so that we can make suggestions on how to cut it, one of the reasons I say this is that, 99.9% of the Olive wood you see here and everywhere, are not from plantation groves but from bigger and older trees from the same species found in Europe and even in Australia, plantation olive trees have been genetically modified to grow less wood, grow smaller, the wood fibres are more elastic (for mechanic vibrating harvesters) and also are made to start to produce fruit a lot earlier than the common species and produce more fruit.
With that said, the only negative side of Olive trees from plantations is that they don't produce much heartwood, which is what has the value, I've seen plantation olive trees 25 years old with a trunk diameter of 8" and a heartwood diameter of 1", even though you don't need 1" of wood to turn a pen the problem is that in that 1" the centre is the pith and that is the first place from where the wood will split as it dries.
My second suggestion is, find out how dry/wet it is, I mean, the moisture content percentage, Olive wood is one of the tree species that take the longest to properly dry (air dry) so, slicing the wood when green will reduce dramatically them drying time but it will take still a few years. The wood can be dried in an oven or microwave and we have here/library plenty of info about that.
Olive wood is oily, stabilisation and CA will take some doing/preparing so, any of the finishing methods already discussed here will be OK.
Best of luck,
Cheers
George
