I thought coal was supposed to be pretty rare...
Smelted from the coal that was given to negative karma characters many years ago. Recoloured ore, that was (unintentionally?) smeltable.
You used to be able to craft with them, though I think it was before the improved crafting gumps.
The current crafting gumps have the ingot selection, rather than the targetting that tailoring with cloth allows.
As far as I'm aware, the type of ore is distinguished solely by the colour of it (use UOA to show a count of ingots in the title bar, and you'll see it counts all ingots, of all colours). Unless coal ingots are the same colour as shadow iron, then I don't imagine you'll be able to select them to craft (and even so, it will probably be called "Shadow Iron xxx").
