Making Methcathinone

by Zwitterion

Why you want to make this shit is beyond me 'cuz its boring as fuck. Alright, it does increase the old energy level, kinda like drinking a lot of coffee without the nausea, but no real fun to it. This is what ZWITTERION knows about making it:

Ephedrine sucks. Yeah it seems to work, but the product doesn't do shit.

It takes only a drop or two of muriatic acid to get the pH down to 5 or so with a 3 gram size batch. Dilute this drop or two to 15mL distilled water and add with stirring. If you go too low on the pH, do NOT attempt to raise it back up by adding base. Decomposition of product will result.

Hair dryer? Hair dryer my ass! Put that shit in pyrex casserole dish, then set that dish in a pot of simmering (not boiling!) water and heat till dry. The "crystals" should be a reddish tan to pink in color and very flaky. They will not, I repeat, will not stay crunchy in milk, so don't even TRY it. Also, whats the point off adding ethanol or methanol to the solution? It won't make it evaporate faster and here's why:

Ethanol forms an azeotrope with water at 95%. If you add azeotropic ethanol to an aqueous solution, guess what'll happen. Yep, first the azeotrope will boil off, then the aqueous solution will start to concentrate. In other words, you just wasted some perfectly useable ethanol.

Methanol? No azeotrope with water but the same thing happens. Yep, the methanol boils off first, then the aqueous phase concentrates. Another waste of good solvent.

Mini-thins seem to be an attractive source of pseudoephedrine, and, well, they are. But theres a hitch to Mini-thins. Yep. They have cellulose type binders in them that will fuck your filter paper up. ZWITTERION has seen a 100mL of solution sit in his vacuum buchner funnel for 24 hours without more than a few drops coming through. And yes, that is AFTER I decanted off the supernatant from the sludge. Fortunately, ZWITTERION has also noted that merely decanting the shit then going from there results in no problems. The KMnO4 doesn't seem to fuck with it at all.

Saturating the solution with KMnO4 at 25C? Bullshit. Go buy a fucking scale dude. $100 will get you a decent digital scale. If the cops come knocking, you probably are gonna get hauled off to jail for the OTHER shit lying around your house, so go ahead and get one. Any serious chemFreak has a scale.

Do not shoot this product.

Recrystallize from acetone. Nothing else seems to work worth a shit.

The mysterious blue crap? Yeah, ZWITTERION has seen it, but it GOES AWAY. The best reason ZWITTERION has seen as an explanation is from Jason Kennely -

"It's probably stearic acid contamination."

Yep, ZWITTERION thinks so too, so eat it and shut up.

And, a special comment for whoever maintains the FAQ - dump the question/answer bullshit, and paraphrase. Your writing style is very readable. Much better than some of the other freak shit that gets posted, but that Q&A thing is so mish-mashed. Good job, kudos, all that shit.

*Next target* - the lava lamp muther who KNOWS methylamine. Sure this fucker's got a dead-on way of making it, but theres a couple things NOT mentioned that'll ruin your day. Also, who taught this fucker how to write? That methylamine FAQ reads like an obituary for a nobel prize laureate.