Hi! You can form the ester by replacing the acetone with ethanol when oxidizing the helional with the oxone.
Ammonolysis of ester works badly because the leaving group is an alkoxide, so the reaction goes very badly.
I've finally found a great protocol for purifying the amide, which makes synthesis via boric acid and urea viable:
30g acid + 26g urea + 2.1g boric acid, heated to 180°C. Once melted, turn on the stirring. Then leave until there are hardly any gas bubbles forming (CO2 and NH3). This usually takes 3-4 hours. Leave to cool, then add 40mL of 5% ammonia solution and heat to boiling with stirring. Not everything will dissolve; these are the impure products of urea condensation. If the amide doesn't precipitate, evaporate some of the solution. once precipitated, filter.
Next, the impure amide is dissolved in a minimum of boiling xylene (or other apolar solvent with a high bp), then hot-filtered. It is possible that certain impurities form a brown liquid phase, in which case pour in the xylene, taking care to leave these impurities in the beaker, as they will remain at the bottom. You'll then see beautiful white amide crystals appear in the receiving beaker. Otherwise evaporates some xylene until crystallization.
The synthesis itself forms a lot of impurities. Whether or not the acid was pure to begin with made no difference to my tests. The amide obtained is really pure and forms beautiful white crystals.
During synthesis, I advise you to use a cooler that's not too big to let the water and ammonia escape (important for the equilibrium of the reaction). This will prevent the amide from escaping, as it tends to sublimate. Remember to wash the edges of the cooler too, to recover as much amide as possible.
I've also tried using Mg(NO3)2 hexahydrate as a catalyst (10% mol) in xylene at 140°C with 2eq urea, and that works too, but it takes 24h.