Ok, I was digging through the garage looking for fertilizer and I noticed a sack of "Chlorine Stabiliser". I examined the fine print and found that it was pure Isocyanuric Acid... is there any feasible way to extract a cyanide from it-- preferably in salt form? It'd be a nice chemical to add to my "collection". (Hehe)

Thanks--

Lynxtor

you might have better luck in lab tips.

a wise man once said:

"this is better living through chemistry."

Alright, thanks for the tip.

--Lynxtor

If it's powdered and mixed with potassium or sodium carbonate, bicarbonate, or hydroxide and heated, it'll depolymerize to release cyanic acid to some extent, which will combine with with the alkaline material to form a cyanate. The cyanate can be reduced to cyanide if it is strongly heated with charcoal while covered to shield it from the air.

For some reason the procedure seems to work better with powdered urea than with (iso)cyanuric acid. I suspect some of the ICA forms a salt with the base before it depolymerizes, and this somehow destructively decomposes without forming a cyanate. That's just my guess, though. It could've been inferior technique on my part when not using urea.

Sodium hydroxide will yield purer cyanate, and hence purer cyanide, because it melts at a lower temperature and mixes better with the urea or ICA (compared with carbonate or bicarbonate). It shouldn't really matter with potassium compounds, since potassium cyanate has a lower MP.

I've written a pretty long document about this very topic that is saved in the text file archive here. One improvement that you should use (compared with my procedure as I wrote it up back then) is to mix your extracted cyanide solution with denatured alcohol (or Everclear) to precipitate the cyanide, rather than boiling all the water away. This method is faster and will minimize atmospheric exposure/degradation of your cyanide.

No melting nesecary, simply mix [the patents use sodium carbonate not hydroxide] baking soda, urea, h20 and heat 120'-200'c until the ammonia smell is no longer present then evaporate the water to reveal sodium cyanate crystals.

Isocynuric acid will not do you any good for methylaminorex.

Adding H2O seems like a bad idea, given how easily cyanates are hydrolyzed. Every lab prep of cyanates I've seen has started with finely powdered urea mixed with the alkali metal compound, no water added. And since he's asking about cyanide he's going to have to heat the material strongly anyway, to reduce the cyanate to cyanide.

Edit: actually, adding water shouldn't hurt anything as long as the material is heated evenly, so all the water evaporates before urea starts decomposing. Trying to make sodium cyanate in aqueous solution is a bad idea, though.

[This message has been edited by Gray (edited 12-07-2003).]

Gray-- Thank you for your help, I managed to find your archived file also and it helped me a lot. I shall try to make sodium cyanide soon, I just hope I won't kill myself in the process.

--Lynxtor