Aussiedistiller, Home Distilling, Moonshine, Home Brew

So not long finished a 2" CCVM build & gave it it's first spirit run of 4 x stripped TPW's on the weekend, all went pretty well for a maiden voyage - once on the boil reduced the gas burner to as slow as I could get it to burn, held it in full reflux for 45 mins or so then collected around 300ml of fores, back into full reflux again for 15 min before collecting again. I just let it go slowly (about 1.5l/hr) for the duration of the run, column temp barely moved off 78.5deg & ABV also held content at 92%. Only at the VERYend did temp start to climb & ABV start to drop, take-off rate had slowed markedly so turned up the wick but rate was still only around a drop per second so I shut it down. Odd thing was (to me anyway) that the ABV at this point was still about 86%, I was expecting it to run down to 40 or so before stopping. The last 2 jars certainly smelled & tasted like tails despite being this high. Is this normal behaviour? One thing that may be important is the RC ended up getting stuck in about the half-closed position, so fairly high reflux ratio...

VM will stop itself when it starts to drop.

Might need to add a LM part if you want the tails :-B

JL, sounds like a near perfect run on the VM, as Sam says, to squeeze out all the remaining alc you need to retro fit a LM component to your column. By nature, the VM will not go beyond a certain point, hence its attractiveness as a very clean/foolproof system with minimal smearing.
Ideally, you take off the heads with your LM, switch to hearts with VM, and back to LM when/if you want to squeeze the tails.
The VM works by the fact that alc vap is heavier than air, so by the time the vap is at about 40% it stops output and goes into 100%reflux. The VM will never extract the last drop.