My zinc powder finally came
That'll save me some much pricier and harder to get hold of reagents that are somewhat more hazardous to handle (namely borohydride, which generally entails quite a lot of highly flammable hydrogen gas evolution during its use, and boride catalysts that I'm not entirely sure whether or not they have the potential to give off some pretty deadly borane/diborane gas (which is not only toxic as hell but diborane spontaneously ignites on contact with air) on contact with acids (as you can guess, probably, I've been keeping to strongly basic workup for that particular catalyst, and intend on just basifying and vacuum distilling the product off without ever converting it to a salt before the product is thoroughly stripped of nickel boride.
Although I certainly am keeping it under investigation for various uses since it does seem to have rather a lot of useful potential. But for the task at hand, I'll likely keep it as a research project scale since now I can use zinc dust and hydrochloric acid to achieve my aim.
