How can this stuff be purchased? There are no legal restrictions on the stuff, but I'm still having trouble finding a source for it that will sell to the public and not in bulk (no, I don't want to buy $5000 worth).

It's trivial to make. What on earth do you need it for? The purpose of this forum is not to help you make your local school/whatever smell like vomit.

1.2 ml s-702-sc-m12 $20.00 $20.00

Butan-1*-ol + [O] -> butanal
butanal + [O] -> butyric acid.

E.g. just oxidise the hell out of it. If you can start with the aldehyde, then even easier. I recommend acidified potassium dichromate.

* Must be a primary, or it obviously won't oxidise either one or both of the steps.

What does "Butyr" mean in whatever godforsaken eastern-european language it's in, anyway?

I recommend bleach and nickel chloride. Cheaper, greener, OTC.

Bleach as in hypochlorite? If yes, as far as my theory goes, same difference, but much better for the above reasons you stated.

Yep. Very easy, but the article that I read about it did claim that it took a lot of bleach, which is doubtful because it's the nickel oxide hydroxide that's doing the oxidizing, so if somebody would like to play around with the reaction and find out the minimum amount needed per mole that would be great.

Hmm, interesting, I have some free time and a depressingly clean lab bench . Was the paper you were looking at specific to oxidising alcohols and aldehydes? I was considering playing around with really simple things, ethanol to ethanal, reaction done basically in a distillation setup with a multinecked flask to add the reagents as required.

Unfortunately with bleach and nickel it would oxidize ethanol all the way to acetic acid. I've read in several places however that bleach without nickel (perhaps with a PTC) would work but that needs more research on my part and more experimentation on somebody else's. I found an interesting solventless reaction the other day with iron nitrate nonahydrate and barium chloride dihydrate that would oxidize alcohols of all varieties fairly well. Work up is unbelievably simple too, so for reactions with a purpose rather than empirical "guess and check", there are far better oxidizers than bleach.