I am looking for some antimony, specificially antimony trichloride, that is available from an OTC source. Anybody out there know of such sources?

the 'lead' strips in car batteries is an alloy of lead and antimony.

Airgun pellets and most likely bullets too are lead alloyed with antimony. The harder the pellet, the more antimony in it.

I wonder how to get the antimony from the metal? I suppose an electrolysis would be the best bet, perhaps in HCl. I hope to be checking my local pottery shop soon, I saw in the OTC thread they can carry antimony trioxide. You can react antimony trioxide with HCl and distill off antimony trichloride.

Mega, you can get antimony minerals from dealers without any hassle, including native (elemental) antimony and antimony sulphide (stibnite) both of them can easily be reacted with hydrochloric acid.
Get yourself a hand book on minerals find a dealer and the chemicals you can find are amazing.
also ebay have a massive range of minerals.

ps. Lead will only have 6% max of antimony in it.

My nearest pottery / ceramics supplier stocks Antimony oxide for NZ$22.00/kg

IIRC, you shouldn't use electrolysis with antimony in HCl. The antimony is deposited in a metastable allotrope, with varying percentages of volatile chlorides in the crystal lattice. If you scratch the crystal, the allotrope rapidly and exothermically reverts to the stable form, vapourising the chlorides in the process, leading to a violent explosion releasing lots of toxic nasties.
I've never witnessed this, but I have heard about it a few times...

Buying from a mineral dealer would be very expensive, My dad has his own business making and selling pewter alloys and the likes. One of the ingredients in pewter is antimony. I'm sure there would be someone in America who does much the same thing as my dad and would be more than willing to sell or give you some. but it would be much cheaper because it would be bought as a metal not a mineral specimen.

Mega, were you planning on using the antimony trichloride as a substitute for phosphorus trichloride in the preparation of acetyl chloride?
IMO it could work, I’m not sure though..

Btw. isn’t this the reaction:
12 HCl + Sb4O6 (The chemfinder (http://chemfinder.cambridgesoft.com/) says that this is antimony trioxide) --> 4 SbCl3 + 6 H2O
And then the acetyl chloride:
3 CH3COOH + SbCl3 --> 3 CH3COCl (I have no idea of what else forms in the reaction, but these are left from it: Sb + 3 O + 3 H)

(Sb + 3 O + 3 H) x 2 = Sb2O3 + 3 H2O

Thanks a lot Mr Cool!

Ok, so the balanced reaction would be this:
6 CH3COOH + 2 SbCl3 --> 6 CH3COCl + Sb2O3 + 3 H2O

Although I’m not sure if it works because the SbCl3 has ionic bonds and PCl3 has covalent (?) bonds.

Well the only way to know for sure is to test it...

EDIT: It seems that there is one more thing to the reaction.
The antimony trioxide forms antimony(III)acid with water..so the reaction will be this:
Sb2O3 + 3H2O -> 2H3SbO3

a longer but possible way (i have to improvise most all my chems) would be as such;

get some lead free solder (flux free) 95% Tin 5% Antimony.
dissolve both in the acid of your choosing, and then displace the Antimony with excess tin.
since both are P block elements but antimony being a bit more elctro negative than tin, the Sb should precipitate out of sollution. of course the next question is, do you have any elemental tin laying about? (i`ll work on that!)
as they are a eutetic mixture, i`m not sure if excess solder would work as your tin source?
it MAYBE worth a shot on a small scale tho?

i`ll try it here in next few days and post results if the thread is still current.

All the best :)

I need the compound as a catalyst to synthesize trimethylchlorosilane for use as a protecting group. This would be an improvised reaction.

i`m not even going to ask what for!

some sort of lubricant or waterproofing for fuze laquers? and drugs doesn`t seem your style.

couldn`t the trimethylchlorosilane be extracted directly from silicone products as a shortcut perhaps?

i`m only guessing here, throw me a bone at least :)

Safety match heads contain antimony(III) sulfide (Sb2S3) and potassium chlorate (KClO3). Also the striking surface is composed of glass and red phosphorus.

Last year I prepared some antimony sulphide reacting sulfur with a "black mass" I think is antimony. in a shoe polish wax can. The results were pretty good in flash powder compositions.

The black mass was obtained this way:

In a bucket I put one quart of hydrochloric acid and same quantity of water.

I got a few pieces of an alloy that is made of zinc aluminum and antimony- this alloy is widely used in many parts we use to call that aluminum- I used some from an old washing machine that I disasembled more precisely the belt pulley cutted in everal pieces.

I dropped the alloy in the dilute hydrochloric acid and one month later, the pieces of metal were floating on the surface, the zinc and aluminum was dissolved by the acid but the antimony remains as a black britle mass.

Gently I removed the black mass and put it in another bucket with warm water in order to rinse it.

After that it was crushed into a fine mass and washed again three times with water and left to settle in between procedures.

I think this is antimony but I don´t know the purity

Mega, rather than taking antimony from the lead in car batteries, a better source is lead wheel weights.

The lead wheel weights have about 6% antimony and most auto repair shops will give them to you for free. If you tell them you are making homemade sinkers for fishing they will give them to you.

I have been able to get 50 lbs at a time from some places.

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Use paragraph breaks. NBK