Ambrosia maple and ebony - classic pairing or lazy contrast?

I did almost the exact same box two winters ago with spalted beech and a gaboon ebony finial, and honestly the ebony read as a flat black dot from across the room. All the grey streaking in the body just stopped dead at the lid and it felt disconnected. I ended up making a second finial out of some cherry I had and the warm tone tied the whole thing together way better. The streaks in ambrosia are mostly grey and brown, so something with red or honey in it plays nicer than pure black in my experience.

That said, ebony is a joy to turn sharp and it polishes up with almost no effort, which is why everyone reaches for it. Wenge is the opposite, it's coarse and splintery and the open grain will fight you on a small finial, though the chocolate and tan striping might actually echo your maple in a good way. I'd turn test finials in both and set the box on the mantel for a few days before you commit. Living with it beats deciding at the lathe. One thing I noticed with my ebony lid was how it made the piece look like a hundred others at the club show. If you want the dark pop without the cliché, dyed walnut or even ebonized maple keeps a little grain visible under the black, which I think reads as more intentional.

I'd throw out a third option nobody's considering yet: make the finial out of the ambrosia itself. I turned a box elder hollow form last fall and cut the finial from the offcut of the same blank, positioned so the streaking carried right up thru the lid line. It reads as one continuous piece instead of body plus hat, and honestly it got more comments at our club show-and-tell than any contrast piece I've done. The trick is picking a section of your scrap with a knot or a dense cluster of those marks so the finial has some visual weight and doesn't just disappear. If the top ends up too quiet you can always swap it later, since you're test-fitting lids anyway with that walnut and wenge. My two cents on the ebony question: dark woods work best when the body wood has big open figure, burls, crotch grain, that kind of thing. Ambrosia's streaking is fine-lined and busy, so a solid black cap competes with it instead of framing it. Walnut would split the difference, warm but still darker than the maple, though on my monitor-brain it might land in mushy middle territory where neither wood pops. Turn all three lids, set the box on the mantel for a week, and let your eye vote. That's usally how I settle these things, my first instinct is almost never the one that survives the week.

On a silver maple box last year I went with a walnut finial for the same reason you're thinking, something warm instead of black. The surprise was how much a coat of oil on the finial changed things. The walnut darkened up and picked up a purple-brown cast that made the grey streaks in the body look almost silvery. Before the oil it was just kind of beige and forgettable. So if you test walnut, oil a scrap first and look at it dry versus oiled before you judge it. Wenge mostly stays the same color wet or dry, which is one thing it has going for it.

Back in the day the old-timers at our club never bought ebony for little knobs like that, they used persimmon, which turns about the same and darkens down to nearly the same black. If you know anybody with a persimmon tree on thier property, a dead limb off that will outperform the imported stuff and cost you a chainsaw's worth of effort. I turned a handful of finials from a storm-dropped persimmon years back and still reach for that stash. The trick with any of those dark woods on a small finial is to part it off while you can still get your wrench on the tenon, not after you've shaped the whole thing.

Update: went ahead and turned a walnut finial and gave it a coat of oil, and that purple-brown cast thing is real, the grey streaks in the maple look way better against it than they did with a test piece of blackwood I had. Still stuck on the same-blank idea though, tried cutting a finial from an offcut and the streaks just don't line up across the lid. How do you position the grain so it carries through instead of clashing?