Try it to see if it works!
Cypher:
By placing the steel wool in vinegar, you're just making iron acetate - a salt of iron in a low pH aqueous medium which will react with the tannin in the wood to create a dark black color. The best way to see if your solution is "done" is to try it on a test piece of wood known to have a significant concentration of tannin in it - try it first on a piece of oak or cherry to see if it stains the wood black. The vinegar may not ever eat away all of the steel wool fibers as a much stronger inorganic acid would (like sulphuric, hydrochloric, or nitric acid), but you may already have created enough iron ions in solution for it to combine with the tannins and turn your wood pieces black. If it doesn't seem strong enough, you may need to add more iron (longer soak of steel wool?), or use more concentrated vinegar/acetic acid. Warming the solution mixture may help too. If steel wool doesn't do it for you, try a small handful of non-galvanized nails (2d finishing nails in a glass jar half-full of vinegar have worked OK for me in the past) using fresh white (distilled) vinegar from standard grocery-store sources.
In this iron acetate ebonizing method, you won't necessarily have to neutralize the acid from the vinegar after the staining is done - just let it dry and sand off all of the 'burrs" raised from the solution.
Note that the wood used must be one having significantly high amounts of tannin in it to ebonize black enough to look like "real" ebony if you go the iron acetate route, and the species should be fine-grained to have a smooth ebony-like surface when finished - don't use ring-porous woods, for example. You can also use black dyes (including black boot dyes - ones that are used for shoes, military footwear, etc.) in water or alcohol solutions to be sure the black color is saturated uniformly in the wood. Hard maple has worked well for me using this dying method.
Good Luck!
Rob Wallace
