I still have another week to go on my trip to Hawaii, but my wood hunting time is about over. It didn't work out for me to get together with any other pen turners this trip, but I did manage to find a few sources for fairly economical local woods that I thought I would share in case any of you find yourself over here some day.
First off, I found a vendor at the Aloha Stadium Swap Meet (6am-3pm Wed, Sat, Sun) last Sunday who had a couple of boxes of Koa off-cuts in front of their booth. Turns out that their son has a factory that makes some of the products they sell & these were some of his offcuts. I selected the best of what they had, then stopped by again today for some more. I got a nice discount from their marked price by buying a decent amount. Final price amounted to about $20 per board foot. Not bad for choice Koa, especially considering that the local Woodcraft store here sells Koa for $50/bf, and what they had on hand was pretty bland stuff.
I also found these turtle-shaped Monkey Pod chopping blocks at the ABC stores in this area. They were on sale for $6.00 each and I figure there's about 15-20 pen blanks in each one. It's Philippine Monkey Pod, but MP is MP. I looked through the selection at 4 different stores & picked out these 3 really nice pieces of wood.
Another good source is the local Wal Mart store. I found these Philippine Acacia cutting boards there, plus a couple of others that I didn't photograph. The rounded off "square" ones were $8 to $10, depending on size and basically amounted to about $12/bf. I'm going to use the ones with the handle cutouts for cheese slicers. The ABC stores also have Acacia cutting boards, but their price is higher than Wal Mart & WM has a better selection.
The neatest place that I found is Re-use Hawaii - it's located in the Honolulu pier area and they have all kinds of reclaimed wood & other building supplies from homes & businesses on Oahu. They are open 7 days a week have a large selection as you can tell from their web site and a nice variety. I picked up the pile of wood in the last photo today for $19.00 total. There's Australian Koa, Hawaiian Koa, Brazilian Cherry, Bamboo and African Mahogany in that pile - enough to fill 2 LFRB postal boxes.
Some of this will no doubt find its way into my prize packs down the road.
Aloha,
Edgar
First off, I found a vendor at the Aloha Stadium Swap Meet (6am-3pm Wed, Sat, Sun) last Sunday who had a couple of boxes of Koa off-cuts in front of their booth. Turns out that their son has a factory that makes some of the products they sell & these were some of his offcuts. I selected the best of what they had, then stopped by again today for some more. I got a nice discount from their marked price by buying a decent amount. Final price amounted to about $20 per board foot. Not bad for choice Koa, especially considering that the local Woodcraft store here sells Koa for $50/bf, and what they had on hand was pretty bland stuff.
I also found these turtle-shaped Monkey Pod chopping blocks at the ABC stores in this area. They were on sale for $6.00 each and I figure there's about 15-20 pen blanks in each one. It's Philippine Monkey Pod, but MP is MP. I looked through the selection at 4 different stores & picked out these 3 really nice pieces of wood.
Another good source is the local Wal Mart store. I found these Philippine Acacia cutting boards there, plus a couple of others that I didn't photograph. The rounded off "square" ones were $8 to $10, depending on size and basically amounted to about $12/bf. I'm going to use the ones with the handle cutouts for cheese slicers. The ABC stores also have Acacia cutting boards, but their price is higher than Wal Mart & WM has a better selection.
The neatest place that I found is Re-use Hawaii - it's located in the Honolulu pier area and they have all kinds of reclaimed wood & other building supplies from homes & businesses on Oahu. They are open 7 days a week have a large selection as you can tell from their web site and a nice variety. I picked up the pile of wood in the last photo today for $19.00 total. There's Australian Koa, Hawaiian Koa, Brazilian Cherry, Bamboo and African Mahogany in that pile - enough to fill 2 LFRB postal boxes.
Some of this will no doubt find its way into my prize packs down the road.
Aloha,
Edgar
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