Hopefully this helps,
If you do the Sodium Bicarb washes as described, and REALLY shake it up, you can skip the sodium chloride washes and proceed to your 5% NaOH wash. You should once again REALLY shake the mix up in your sep, then walk away for 20-30 minutes.. upon return, you should have two very distinctive layers as the top layer will be darker, and the bottom layer will be more light brown with each wash.
If you missed some organic material when filtering, you can expect a great deal of emulsion. Filter through 2 coffee filters, and examine the amount of solids collected.
If you have barely anything collected in your coffee filter, expect an excellent yield.
A friend has also found that the addition of Hcl to the water used to flood the filtered rxn mix is pointless and did not effect yield whatsoever. If you disagree, then keep on keep on.
If you scale this Rxn 2.5x and have a 20L carboy handy with a spigot on the bottom, and a 4L sep, you will find that the 4L sep gets 95-99% filled. Unfortunatly, a 4L sep is not big enough for the flooding of the rxn contents, so a 10 - 20L carboy works great, and allows you to do get a nice little workout as you manually shake the fucker in a momentum like circular motion. You need the workout you lazy fucker. Hey, your also going to yield a nice 300-325g of ketone! You just killed 2 birds with 1 stone! Try that 20x in a week!
