1)How did Ibee get so much from so little ?
You'd be surprised how much those filters soak up. Esp. as the solution containing the meth begins to cool off, as the meth becomes less soluable. The filters you used can all be saved until a rainy day and extracted with the boiling H2O as you did. The rp however, should always be washed thoroughly after all reactions. A whole lot of you yeild can get stuck in the rp, esp. if it wasn't as clean and some glues and shit got into the rxn. SWIM always squeezes the last bit of H2O out of the filter used to filter the post reaction solution, as much as he can without breaking the filter. Then, the filter is opened up and set on a dish. The rp is scraped out with a scoopula and plopped into a beaker. Some water is heated in a pan until boiling, the poured over the rp. The is stirred well, and any clumps of rp are broken. The it is filtered, and the rp left in the filter to dry out for to be thrown in another run. The water from the rp rinse is always added to the main solution. SWIM has noticed a noticeable improvment in yeilds of the rp/I2 after he started doing this.
2)What, if any, part did the iso alch play in this result?
The same part boiling water would play, just a polar solvent to dissolve the polar meth stuck in the rp. SWIM reccomends to just use boiling H2O, cuase it'll save you a step. If you use alcohol, then extract an alcoholic H2O/NaOH with xylene, your gonna pull over some uneccessary garbage into the xylene (or whatever non-polar you use). The alc is miscible with water, and is also miscible with most non-polars, so a lot of crap will be transferred. If you pulled from alc, heat the non-polar gently until no more alc smell is detected. Sometimes, esp. if gaks are present, a precipitate will form which should be filtered. Then wash with water, then titrate. Obviously if the gear you received was pretty clean fresh out, then that wasn't too much of a prob. But SWIM garuntees it would be so much cleaner fresh from titration if you got rid of the alc. Also, since meth freebase is soluable in alc, since alc is miscible with water, when you wash the non-polar some alc will move to the water, hence some yeild will go to.
3)Should hot iso alch be used for the last rinse of the red phos in a normal synth?
Again just use hot water, see above.
4)What would (or was) the drawbacks/side affects or by-products of using the iso alch ?
I beleive I already inadvertently answered this above.