oh the joys of mis-labeled products!
My friend had purchased a kilo of NaCN for something he was doing along with some quantity of KCN too. Now when he left for Asia he gave me all of the
stuff he hadn't been able to shift himself, in there was quite a quantity (not far off 1kg) of NaCN! Now I opened the tin and got the most attrocious
stench!... (has anybody figured this out yet?)... A smell that I recognised instantaneously, sodium cyanoborohydride!
So i pondered could what I have be this but have the wrong label? I put it away in my cupboard and forgot about it. Well the other day I was having a
clean out and found it, so I put a small sample into a vial and gave it to a mate at university with me. He ran an IR on it, which was spoilt by water
in the sample (cyanoborohydrides are hygroscopic and deliquiscent) but had clear bands for cyanoborohydride and was definitely not teh cyanide. He
then ran an NMR which showed characteristic B-H. This is most certainly not cyanide and is most certainly cyanoborohydride.
I'm going to separate this out of the bag into a large stock jar and then some smaller jars of 50g or so. I will be drying some of the samples to see
how that goes and will hopefully get around to doing a purity assay by iodometry.
Just thought I'd share this... So if anyone has been using cyanides and had strange results and it smells fishy... consider it could be
cyanoborohydride you have!
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