Tuesday, December 9, 2008

How to Ebonize Wood

When working with wood projects or doing intarsia wood projects, it is necessary to use an ebony piece of wood to help differentiate a design, pattern, or accent. However, ebony wood is very expensive and often hard to find - so I have a trick you can use to get an ebony look from your oak wood stock. The process is called "ebonising" and it is an actual chemical reaction of white vinegar to tannic acid in the wood. Here is how you do it!

Get a clean glass jar with a lid, such as a small jam jar, or a small salsa jar.

Get some white vinegar, the kind used for cooking, and fill the glass jar half way with the vinegar.

Take a full piece of 00 steel wool (very fine), and stuff it into the solution. Use authentic steel wool, and not synthetic steel wool.

Let the solution sit for three day to a week. The longer it sits, the darker the solution will get.

To ebonize the wood, all you have to do is brush the solution onto the wood, or soak the wood piece in the solution. When the color gets dark enough, just brush on some ammonia to neutralise the reaction and stop the darkening.

1 comment:

Allison said...

Hi, My name is Allison and I have written a similar article that can be found here
http://www.wood-alley.com/2008/09/ebonizing-steel-wool-and-vinegar.html
Stop by some time.
I found you through Google Alerts.I would love to follow your blog if you ever enable that feature.
I will be back
Allison
www.wood-alley.com