The HCl's are a bugger to work with, because they're poorly soluble and whatever you want to do after Manske requires dissolved alks (filtering, ammonia-based separation, zinc reduction...).
In the extraction I'm currently doing, I couldn't dissolve my HCl's and keep them dissolved for long enough to be able to do anything with them. I found myself re-heating the mixture repeatedly as the HCl's would recrystallize promptly.
I decided to bring it to a high temperature, base with NaOH, collect the freebase and re-dissolve in vinegar. The reason I chose NaOH was the volume was already large and I didn't want to waste a lot of ammonia.
I followed through with the plan, but upon basing I realized the freebase was falling on a layer of HCl's!
I'm going to add vinegar to dissolve the freebase and hopefully after that there won't be a lot of HCl's, so I can repeat the heating / basing process with less headaches.