Taylor Guitars is playing a benign paternalistic role in running an ebony mill in Cameroon. One terrific thing they've done is they discovered that stripy ebony trees had been left to rot since instrument makers wanted only black! Now they're cultivating a taste for striped ebony in their clients.
They produce a line of cutting boards using ebony pieces too short for instruments. Their construction seems fatally flawed to me. They have a thick ebony veneer on each side of a sapele core, but it sure looks to me like the ebony is at cross grain to the core, as if creating lumber core plywood. But the ebony is too thick for that, and in my experience creating a plywood with ebony veneer of much width is courting cracks in any climate that will force dimensional change (almost all). Even if the core ran long grain differential shrinkage would , I would think, likely produce cracks. But this is Taylor Guitars---so am I missing something?...
https://stellafalone.com/products/re...-cutting-board