Turpentine Production

[renewablejohn]

Does anybody have any experience of turpentine production. Looking at old photo's it would appear to be similar to rubber production but on pine trees. I would certainly like to have a go in my forest but unsure of the process and what sort of trees would be best. I have a choice of lodge pole pine, scots pine, larch and Norway spruce. Any help would be appreciated

[tommer9]

The pines would be useful, but the larch and spruce less so. Originaly it was made from the turpentine tree, Pistacia terebinthus. Very toxic substance though, which can cause liver failure, which is partly why it is so hard to get hold of genuine turps like it used to be i think.

[renewablejohn]

Have done a bit more research and apparently they do a lot in Austria but by drilling a hole into the centre of the tree and then putting a wooden plug over the hole.I know some guys on here work in Austria any chance of finding out any more information as the technique seems far better than that used in America which is similar to rubber tapping.

[agg221]

It's not a straight tapping operation - it's a volatile extraction process from the sap, which can either be harvested by tapping or from the wood. If you use the wood you need to chip it first, or you can 'crack' it as part of the decomposition process leading to charcoal and wood tar.

 

It can be done from a range of pine species.

 

Extraction from sap gives you the advantage of yielding solid rosin residue which may be directly useable. Extraction from wood chip is obviously easier if you're chipping the trees anyway, e.g. for biomass. This is done either by solvent extraction or by steam distillation - on the 'domestic' scale, steam distillation is probably easier to manage - literally pass the steam through the chip and extract the condensate from the top, then separate the oil (turpentine) from the water.

 

Cracking it can be done fairly easily - you need a sealed vessel with a pipe off the top, fill with lumps and then heat the outside, usually with a fire. The wood decomposes and you collect the various fractions through a pipe off the sealed vessel. You get a mixture of water, methanol, turpentine and tar. What's left in the vessel at the end is very high quality charcoal. The turpentine and water are first as they're being boiled off, not cracked. If you switch collection once the tar starts coming over then the first fraction can be split out easily as above. The second fraction is the cracking products - a mixture of water and methanol with wood tar. These separate into two layers. Note, the gases coming off here contain a reasonable amount of flammable hydrocarbons, with some hydrogen and carbon monoxide, so ideally you route the outlet from the cracking vessel down a long tube to condense it, into a sideways T-piece. The 'down' goes into the collecting pot, below the surface of the liquid while the 'up' goes into an elbow and back up into the fire to burn it off. By keeping the collecting tube below the liquid it always creates a slight pressure that way so it's easier for the gases go off and get safely burned.

 

If you want the methanol it can be separated from the water by subsequent distillation - same thing applies if you just mix the lot, it can be fractionally distilled out. The only added complication with fractional distillation is that you need to know the temperature at the still head. It's easy enough to rig this (I once did it with some old plumbing fittings and a thermometer) but it's a bit more fiddly, so it's easier to do it as two batches.

 

There is another method based on running a very long collecting tube with a series of strategic 'down pipes' based on knowing what has condensed where along the tube, but this requires a lot of experience to get right.

 

Hope this helps!

 

Alec

[Ty Korrigan]

It is used as a source for turpentine, possibly the earliest known source. The turpentine of the terebinth is now called Chian, Scio, or Cyprian turpentine.

 

The fruits are used in Cyprus for baking of a specialty village bread. In Crete, where the plant is called tsikoudia, it is used to flavor the local variety of pomace brandy, also called tsikoudia. In the Northern Sporades the shoots are used as a vegetable (called tsitsírava).The plant is rich in tannin and resinous substances and was used for its aromatic and medicinal properties in classical Greece. A mild sweet scented gum can be produced from the bark, and galls often found on the plant are used for tanning leather. Recently an anti-inflammatory triterpene has been extracted from these galls.[3] In Turkey, where it is known as menengiç or bıttım, a coffee-like beverage known as menengiç kahvesi[4] is made from the roasted fruit and a soap[5] is made from the oil. Terebinth resin was used as a wine presevative in the ancient Near East.[6]

[renewablejohn]

Ty

 

Thanks for that. Makes my wanting to use turpentine as a 100% substitute for diesel seem rather boring.

[renewablejohn]

Agg221

 

Thanks for the info I will email you some more questions as it all looks rather positive.