I got a bit lucky on the Koa front. My cousins husband is a carpenter, and one of his customers used to have logging rights in Hawaii back in the 70s. The customer set aside several thousand board feet of Koa for his own use, and has my cousin in law make furniture every so often. When that happens, I usually end up with a few board feet of 4/4 cutoffs. So for me Koa is free! My pieces range from quite dark to quite light and are all seasoned for 30 years.