I love this tek because there are pictures. I need pictures to both inspire and to check my results to know if I'm on track or not. Chemistry I know little of. Recipes I figure I can do, but somehow I always end up changing some small something because of reading some thread and... well, things soon don't match up.

Anyway, the tek contains this line:

"Depending on how much salt, water and time was used, you may want to keep the filtered solution and reduce it some more to "push" any stray alkaloids out."

More yield, right? OK but that's a pretty broad claim in terms of scope--"depending how much...". Anyway, in the never-ending quest for MORE YIELD I tried this. But now I'm not sure that line should be there because I am not sure that doing that process gives you the same stuff as the first/main manske did. Purely on a visual level I am hard pressed to believe the resultant crystals are the same stuff?

I could have gone wrong somewhere but rather than "stray" alkaloids I think they are entirely different ones.

I reduced only 150ml out of 500+ and the two lots of crystals seem to be completely different rather than 'more of the same' as I was anticipating.

What am I missing here? Hopefully the pics explain...

(a note - the hcl in the filter was squeezed to get liquid out at one stage hence the light clumpiness vs the nice loose needles of the manske-on-the-manske hcl)

I too have pushed the limits of reducing and re-mansking and agree the reduced crystals are often not the same. After many runs i have concluded that a minor reduce and re-manske is the most that should be done. I wouldnt recommend reducing heavily.

A minor reduce will always produce dirtier crystals that should not be combined with the first manske product. Make a production branch at this point and reprocess any 2nd manske crystals separately. If they clean up to look the same then keep, otherwise throw.

I am unable to prove anything about what these may or may not be, but that is my advice based on felt experience.