Saul my man, no offense but if you can't perform your steam distillation it's not the syntheses fault or people are not lying to you. According to your description you destroyed the freebase by heating it so much that water instantly evaporated, it is plain wrong what you did.If you care to stop improvising tried and tested techniques like steam distillation maybe you would get more results. Either add some clean water to the extracted portions in 1 vessel, or with 2 separate vessels, 1 for steam connected to the other one.