I read an interesting post at scimad that mentioned mixing molten aluminum with galinstan(66.5% galium, 20.5% indium 13% tin), cooling and then dropping it into impure nitromethane to produce a steady stream of methylamine gas.  Does anyone have advice for this type of reduction?  Could anyone explain why galinstan is prefered over plain galium, is this to make treating aluminium easier? If you are melting them together it shouldn't matter,correct?  Ga has a max solubility of 9% in aluminium, much more then that and you will have a liquid when your reaction heats up, maybe this is a good thing?  This alloy seems to have a lot of potential...

http://www.sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?tid=14173
http://www.sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?tid=1261&page=5#pid188279
http://www.sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?tid=11687
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2010/0028255.html

......"if it ain't broke don't fix it", but if things can be improved less toxic and  more available, then it's called progress, hence it's how we develop better and more available resources in this clandestine world of chemistry.......also interesting using copper sulfate as reported in another thread to amalgamate aluminum.......java

I can see this being better then al/hg because it does not require thin pieces of aluminium (foil).  How long would it take you to prepare enough foil to reduce 1kg of nitromethane?  With Al/Ga you would simply melt the two together and drop the chunk into solution.  Alternatively it can be casted while still hot into any shape you would like.  Also the reaction is apparently much more vigorous then al/hg so less surface area is required.  Couple that with the very low toxicity of gallium compared to mercury and I ask you: why not?

Could someone post an experimental al/hg reduction of nitromethane to metylamine freebase writeup?  Im interested because someone mentioned on scimad that an acid would need to be added to the nitromethane for this reduction to work, I just don't think that makes sense since the al/hg reduction has been proven to work without acid or the presence of water which is counter intuitive.  Shouldn't an alcohol be present? 

This makes me think you can just grab a few gallons of otc nitro (with a healthy methanol content), drop in an al/ga plug and pipe this gas into hcl to get very pure methylamine.hcl or pipe it into very cold methanol for immediate use via nabh4.  This would eliminate the distillation of nitromethane which scares many-a bee.

The reason behind the use of Al/Hg is so that the MeNO₂ and the subsequently formed imine can be reduced at the same time, IE instead of using MeNH₂ in a reductive amination people use Nitromethane at the cost of lowered yeilds and hotter reaction.

You are correct though in that dissolving metal reductions handle Nitromethane to methylamine quite well if not better since you are not dealling with competing reactions as you are with a one pot imine reduction.

Without any sort of open flame or other source of ignition, there is nothing to be scared of.  So unless you're "cooking" on a stove top, it's really a non issue.

Why would someone pay close to 2000 dollars for 200L of MeNO2 when the equivalent of hexamine is so much cheaper and the reaction so much easier to  control?

Sedit, I've never been able to make the thermal rearrangement of the ammonium acid sulfate ester happen without losing over 60% of product to the alkene.  Still cheap, but not easy to affect by any means.