naval stores

naval stores, products such as tar, pitch, turpentine, pine oil, rosin, and terpenes obtained from the pine and other coniferous trees, and originally used in maintaining wooden sailing ships. Naval stores are produced chiefly by the United States and France, with large amounts coming also from Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Mexico.

Gum naval stores are derived from the oleoresin, a fluid commonly called crude turpentine, that exudes from incisions made in the living trees. Wood naval stores are obtained by the chemical processing of deadwood.

Oleoresin, also called gum, or pitch, the raw material of gum naval stores, is a semifluid substance composed of resins dissolved in turpentine oil, its chief component being pinene. It is extracted from the pine by cutting through the sapwood into the heartwood of the tree, in which the resins accumulate, and collecting the exudate from the wound. From the cleansed and purified gum, turpentine is extracted by steam distillation, and the residual compounds harden into a pure, translucent, pale amber rosin.

Wood naval stores are derived from salvaged pinewood, such as tree stumps, and downwood, or lightwood, pine from which the bark and sapwood have fallen away in decay. Although methods of treating the wood vary, usually it is shredded and subjected to heat under pressure. The volatile components are driven off, condensed, and refined by fractional distillation; they yield wood turpentine and pine oil, the latter product unobtainable from the oleoresin of the living tree. The residual resin retained in the shredded wood is extracted by treatment with a hydrocarbon solvent. The resulting resinous solution is purified and the solvent evaporated to obtain wood rosin.