Buster, hope you find the following useful.
To a 2 1/2 litre brown glass winchester, on a stirrer, add in the following order:1060g aldehyde, a 3" stir bar, 750g nitroE, 99g cyclohexylamine. Begin stirring, hopefully the stir bar will not go walk about. Continue stirring for around 20 mins.
Screw the cap on the winchester and put it in a dark place. SomeBee, being pernickity, takes out the winchester every couple of days and pipets off the water which will have formed. He doesn't know if this helps as the water is not actually in the rxn, it floats on top.
After 20-ish days a crystalline yellow layer will start to form on the bottom of winchester, it will grow upwards and eventually fill the winchester with yellow xtals. When it nears the top it's best to decant off the lacrymatory liquid into a smaller 1l winchester. Keep the big winchester upside down for 1/2 hr to drain off all the eye stinging liquid from the yellow mass. It may be nessessary to add more base catalyst to the remaining yellow oil at this time, say 10% of it's volume, and mix well.
Cover the xtals in the big winchester with cold IPA or MeOH and shake. You can then leave it in the fridge until required for further experimentation.
To retrieve your product, you must slowly heat the winchester in a water bath to 60ºish, having first decanted off the OL, which you boil up and return to the now hot winchester. This part of the operation is very, very eyewatering.
The cold condensation results in a clean product which does not require re-xtalization… but you can if you want.
Ohhhh! Your yield of yellow stuff, should you dry and weigh it, will be 1-1.3 Kg.
Lino
ps you will find it far more rewarding to make ketone from the yellow stuff. Then follow Os's Al/Hg advice.
Linoleum: the 13th element! Now available at all good DIY stores… & Walmart.