Ebonizing Fluid

I mentioned ebonizing fluid in my last (or rather first) post. This is a solution used to turn wood black. The item pictured in the photograph, a replica tonfa style baton for martial arts training is a example of something that looks kind of cool with a shiny black finish.

1) Making rust
If you don`t have some rusty nails etc handy, throw a packet of the cheapest steel wool you can find into an icecream container and add a centimetre of water. Slosh it around to wet the wool. You want the wool to be damp but not immersed as too much water will actually keep the oxygen out, and you need the oxygen to get into the steel to produce the iron oxide. In days the wool will be brittle and rusty, if you stir it a bit with a stick you will find it makes a lovely mess. If you do have some rusty items handy, use that and skip this step. There is nothing special about steel wool other than the huge surface area allows it to rust quickly.

2) Add the vinegar
The vinegar dissolves the rust and forms iron salts in solution which is what you want. I poured in a litre of vinegar. No real need to measure this carefully it doesn`t matter as vingar is a very weak acid and you should have more rust than you need anyway. Leave it for a couple of days to react away. This is a good mid-week activity.

3) Filter
You end up with a cloudy murky and nasty looking soup. However, this can be filtered to a nice clear liquid. My first filtering attempt used 2 coffee filters, this seemed to trap about half of the sediment but the finer particles made it through. A much more effective (but slow) approach was to stuff them stem of a funnel with an ordinary facial tissue and let the fluid filter through slowly (about 5 drips per minute), topping it up whenever you go past. Its really slow but it works great. I put the now ready to use fluid in the (now empty) vinegar bottle.

4) Apply the finished product
I have tried brushing it onto timber and also soaking small items in the fluid. Some woods react quickly and go quite dark, others seem to have almost no reaction. Apparently this is to do with the amount of tannin in the timber. I have read that you can artificially add tannin to timber (to some extent) by dabbing on strong black tea.