Procuring thiourea

[kleptophobiac]

While not related to explosives, I'd like to find a decently cheap way of getting thiourea. It's the reducing agent to take stannous chloride and deposit tin metal. I just have no idea where to get it.

Synthesizing it might be a lot of trouble because of the precursors and equipment necessary to do so. I checked the various OTC survey threads and didn't see it listed there. If anybody has any insight on where to get it, that'd be wonderful.

Alternatively, if anybody knows of other formulations for an electroless tin bath, I'd love to hear them. I'd like to avoid cyanides if at all possible. They're nasty to use and difficult to get.

Thanks!

[nbk2000]

Metal cleaning compounds, particulary those for silver, contain Thiourea.

Though as to the amount within...I don't know. Something for you to find out and report back here with, eh? :)

[BlackFalcoN]

Thiourea can be found in various brands of 'silver dip'. It's used to clean and remove tarnish on silver objects.
The dip is a mixture of (approximately) 5% thiourea and an acid.

If you could neutralize the acid and extract the thiourea, you should have a fair amount of it to use in your project.

I'd suggest you take a look at jeweler shops or coin collector supplies, since they frequently deal with cleaning and restoring silverworks.

Note that thiourea is rather toxic and is rated a carcinogenic in animals (assumable in humans too), so take your precautions.

[Chris The Great]

Thiourea is also used in the synthesis of mercaptans and diaminotetrazole, a nifty precursor to some potentially very high energy explosives.

It doesn't seem like a very easy chemical to obtain OTC or synthetically in reasonable quantity unfortunately.

[megalomania]

Thiourea is also used in photography. It can be ordered in rather large quantities, and it rather high purity from suppliers of photographic chemicals for quite reasonable sums of money ($10-$20 per pound). It can be synthesized via several different routes (cyanamide and hydrogen sulfide, from ammonium thiocyanate), but getting those precursors can be just as problematic.

[kleptophobiac]

Alright, thanks for the ideas guys! I'll report back how things go.

My first stop is going to be a photographic supply house, possibly even this week on my day off.

[Meawoppl]

Check out this site:
http://www.photoformulary.com/
All sorts of chemicals including thiourea by the pound.

Out of curiosity are you also looking for chlormethylamide?

[megalomania]

I think what Meawoppl meant to ask is "Out of curiosity are you also looking for chloroacetamide?"

[nbk2000]

If providing a URL to a source, please be sure to enclose it in ' ' or CODE tag to prevent the source from seeing that we're linking to them. I also use the underline tag to make the link stand out like it normally would, so it doesn't get lost in the text block.

They might put restrictions in place on a product if they get the idea that MAD BOMBERZ! are buying from them.

[Meawoppl]

I will do my best to avoid such follies in the future.
Thanks nkb.
Thanks also mega for the nomenclature assistance there.

[megalomania]

No no no... do not enclose links in tags, please leave them be. We have a link anonymizing hack in place, as well as a hack to prevent guests from browsing our links. These are new features of the upgraded software that are far more effective than the versions on the old board.

Try me...

anonymized: www.pubs.acs.org
not anonymized: www.roguesci.org/megalomania

[nbk2000]

Well, anonymized or not, it still truncates long URL's, making them useless if we have problems with the board software in the future, like has happened in the past with our previous anonymizer. :(

Isn't there someway to keep the URL's intact? I know admin can recover the entire URL, but that'd be impossible to do for months worth of clipped URL's.

And it's NBK, not nkb.

[megalomania]

The truncating is a standard feature of vbulletin, not a hack. No feature to disable it, but i'll track it down in the code someday.