Many bees are making methylamine out of hexamine and HCl acid.Raf thinks it's very time consuming and HCl is pretty nasty.Raf has found that one can easily make lots of good quality methylamine from ammonium chloride and formalin.Only drawback with this method is that one must have good quality formalin.It may have paraform sediment in the bottom,it doesn't hurt,not even a bit but formalin has to be strong and not some diluted shit.35-40% is fine.
Now to the more-less foolproof method.If you do like said below,you get around 400-450 grams of pretty pure dimethylamine free methylamine hydrochloride which is perfect for Al amalgamations.
Methylamine from Ammonium chloride and formalin a la raffike
Chemicals needed: 1100 grams of ammonium chloride
2 liters of 35-40% formalin
about half a litre of chloroform
The process:Pour your formalin into a big round bottom(use at least 5 liter RB) flask along with ammonium chloride and stir a bit.Raf used 12 liter round bottom flask:
Start heating slowly and every once in a while stir a little.
Soon it looked something like that,at 40 C or so:
At 80 C:
At 90 or so it exothermic reaction kicks in(it needs to be cooled in a water bath once in a while at the beginning in order to keep temperature below 104-106C):
Soon reaction slows down and cooling isn't needed anymore,reaction flask must be heated carefully to keep temperature at 104-106 or so.It looks something like that:
Keep that temperature 3-4 hours or so,then turn heat up and boil water away till you see ammonium chloride coming out of solution.Cool to 20 C and vacuum filter ammonium chloride out with large Buchner funnel(raf has 25 cm one).You should get a clear yellowish filtrate like that:
Transfer it to a smaller flask like raf did and boil water away till you see internal temperature rising over 160C,then turn on vacuum and continue,first temperature falls some tens of degrees C and if when rises back to 160 C or so,methylamine is pretty water-free.Turn heating and vacuum off.Raf had something like that:
Pour your methylamine in a beaker.First it's liquid(in this picture it has started to solidiy,you can still see some orange liquid in the bottom of the beaker):
Cool your methylamine down and you have a big chunk of hard and dry methylamine.Wash few time with chloroform and you have totally white mush looking like that:
Vacuum filter to get pure and dry methylamine.HCl that reeks chloroform smell which could be removed using a vacuum desiccator.DO NOT try to use oven to get rid of these traces of chloroform,it picks water from air like nothing.Only vacuum for sucessful drying but these CHCl3 traces don't hurt methylamine at all and may be left in,but you just may be a perfectionist...
Final yield of snow white non-sticky powder,which consists mostly of methylamine and maybe few % of ammonioum chloride and almost no dimethylamine.HCl,is,if everything done correctly,over 400 grams like nothing,even 500 grams if your formalin was 40%.