Smiley_Boy, I gotta hand it to you, you kicked down more than your share of outstanding methods here. This is a dynamite thread on reducing agents. Would the borane complex form in dioxane, as well as THF? (Dioxane, n. the distillate of ethylene glycol with dilute sulfuric acid. All solvent ethers, including cyclic ethers, should be distilled with a reducing agent like a ferrous salt to eliminate peroxide explosions.) Yet THF is obtainable from OTC formulations.
Neat trick with the lithium borohydride. Perhaps that's why nearly all elementary lithium salts are watched some places. I once considered trying to get it out of grease, hee-hee, before they started making those handy batteries. I learned from that pointer about the atomic radii.
Direct combination of sodium, aluminum and hydrogen still sounds cleaner to me than messing with aluminum chloride intermediate. Plus it's a process design challenge, depending on what temperature is required. Someday I'll build my hydrogen tower, a vertical countercurrent furnace with solids or liquids dropping from the top through a blast of hot hydrogen. Better warn the neighbors.
Edit:
for the price, there's also sodium amalgam - once the method of choice, now poo-pooed for a number of different reasons.
The deprecated sodium amalgam is available without recourse to elemental sodium, just by electrolyzing NaOH solution with a mercury cathode. When the mercury solidifies, it has absorbed enough sodium for use. This is also a prep for metallic sodium, by distilling off the mercury, a Really Hazardous Operation.
The whip hand, in reach, can take control from the gun hand.
I've done that.
Some say I'm bad.
