Hellman's account of reacting Hg with I
2 crystals is probably better than mixing Hg with iodine tincture. Despite the fact that both methods create a sufficient amount of HgI
2 for use in MM Al/Hg amination, I can't see how all that extra Iodine/IPA/Potassium Iodide from the tincture won't fuck around with the Al/Hg reaction, even though some bees reported success when they used the HgI2 straignt from the tincture bottle, so I guess it works!
If one were to use Hellmans method, then one would need iodine crystals. The link below is a procedure documented by Seelight that details how to extract iodine crystals from 100ml's of 5% tincture, which is easily obtained from any veterinary supply (no prescription required and not suspicious at all to purchase), although Seelight's method yields only 8g of Iodine. A bit low, but if it's for a 25g ketone run using Al/Hg, that's way more than you need (you only need to react 373mg of I
2 with 295mg of Hg to create 669mg HgI
2 for 25g of ketone, just to be exact
)
Seelight's method of extracting Iodine from 5% tincture
https://www.thevespiary.org/rhodium/Rhodium/chemistry/iodine.tincture.html