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I'm sure followers of my blog will be notified of new posts as they have been previously with WP, though for casual visitors, bear in mind that I tend to post every week and at the latest by Sunday evening.

For several years, the model I made of the Bayliss-Thomas chassis has been sitting on top of a chest of draws in my sitting room. Every time I go to dust, the back wheels fall off and I've been meaning to do something about it for, er, several years.

As it's approaching the Spring-cleaning season and time for me to give everything a quick flick over with the dusting gloves (they make the job so much easier than with an ordinary duster) I resolved to peen over the ends of the axle with the drums in situ and glue the wheels to the hubs.

That all went very well until I turned the model over to fiddle in the rear spring hanger pins. The front axle and steering mechanism turned into an exploded diagram all over the kitchen table. It was a blinkin' task getting it all back together again - with less dextrous fingers and lacking the 20/20 vision I had ten years ago, things don't get any easier. In this regard, I keep looking at the Albatros D.Va museum quality kit I bought a couple of years ago.... hmm.

The Great Collector's Talbot hood is coming along. The basic patterns have been cut out and clamped to the frame to make sure that the hood works properly. I'll trim the patterns to actual size and then tackle the sewing machine. Luckily, there's a book of instructions - what could possibly go wrong?

The heater matrix palaver has developed into quite a big job. To get all the ducts in line (ha!) I've had to add some of the body formers to see where the windscreen is going to lie.

And whilst I was doing that, I thought it would be interesting to create an artist's impression to check all was well with the overall shape of the Teardrop Special.

This sketch plus a b&w of the picture above ...

... created this, and all looks well.

Thinking about the door construction; Prewarcar had this picture in one of their daily articles. It certainly gives a few pointers as to how the professionals did things. My doors will have quite a lot of curvature at the top and winding windows are not going to be possible. I've been thinking about sliding panels and ultimately that's the way forward. The tricky bit is getting a. the right material - not just any old Perspex, and b. moulding the panels to suit the frame. I shall consult a few of my aircraft construction books as I'm pretty sure I've seen described the method for blowing canopies somewhere in their pages. Being out of the weather, Plexiglass side windows are much less of a problem than that same material in the windscreen. When over time the side panels become opaque, provision will be made for them to be easily renewed.