well, swim was having alot of trouble with apparent glycol contamination in the ketone from his performic runs. bad yields of ketone and bad yields aminating it...
being too lazy
to measure the density of his 6-month-old-unrefridgerated h2o2 he just picked up some fresh 35%.
he then reacted 24.7g iso + 4.85g Na2CO3 with performic prepared ala labtop, stirring for 24 hours. he separated the dcm, extracted the aqueous solution once more, and boiled off most of the dcm at atmospheric pressure. this was left to cool, then high vacuum was applied until the pump exhaust smelled like formic acid. yielded 34.6g of yellow oil, if pure that's a 98.9% yield of monoformyl glycol.
ritter was right on. Na2CO3 has the additional advantage over bicarb in that it doesn't foam up and force you to slow down the addition rate.
swim then rearranged the glycol for 3h with 60ml MeOH and 180g 15% h2so4 (drain cleaner) per 100mmol iso used. extracted, washed with bicarb, and distilled 20.2g ketone from 100-107C (peaking at 105C) with no column. the ketone shows none of the stickiness seen before. 74.4% molecular yield from iso.
swim had a bit of trouble forming the oxime from it, only small amounts would crystallize, the rest congealed and was scooped out. oxime looks like it will never dry... so swim is running a MeNH2/al/hg in the meantime, will know the yield soon.
IMHO the buffered performic with FRESH peroxide is a totally bomb-proof way to make several hundred grams of ketone in average sized glassware. i suppose the o2 wacker can do the same for you, but it has it's own tricks and limits you to how much you can shake.