Lurking in a pile of stuff that may or may not have been needed in the current project, were these two pieces....

... and although they looked like part of the chassis, I couldn't place them...

... until a gentleman visited the stand at the Culford Car Show and later contacted me about his 1954 Riley RME project he has for sale. The body and chassis are reported to be in very sound condition, though missing the original engine, gearbox and propshaft. The V5 and buff logbook is present and all for £1000. The V5 is worth half of that already! Pop a comment in the box below if you're interested and I'll forward chap's details. Anyway, most interesting to me was that the photograph showed clearly that my two blue pieces were support beams for the bumper paraphernalia and attach to holes in the lower front subframe (I always wondered what they were for).

All this is very handy to know because I was planning to do something about taking the weight of the radiator in any case. That's a job I now don't have to think about.

Continuing the saga of the starter motor, I received a sample bung from a company specialising in rubber products. A piece with a hole in it was priced at £35. That seemed rather a lot, so I looked at solid bungs (£3 each, minimum order forty - you just can't win) into which I could introduce a hole to take the inner thingummy. Boring a smooth bored hole in rubber is not an easy task. My first attempts, after I'd squeezed the oversize bung into the outer casing in order to hold it steady, were not encouraging. I know there's some gen on the web about drilling rubber; I'll consult the oracle.

I found this picture on the web and it's given me a good idea of how to construct the body frame. There's quite a lot of Ash in that - perhaps I won't use quite as much because I'm going to incorporate a roll bar which will also serve as a strong point to attach seat belts. I know seat belts aren't exactly period, but if your head is travelling towards the windscreen at even 20mph, you might be glad of them.

I've got a job coming up which is going to require a good deal of aluminium welding - the above is a quick test. I normally get this done by George. He does a first-class job (that's 50 years of experience I'm paying for) but it's about time I got to grips with the process so I don't have to work around peoples' holidays and so forth. To this end, another chum is coming along to set up the welder (I haven't a clue what some of the knobs mean) and give me some pointers. The rest is up to me. Fortunately, the job is all ¼" thick square and rectangular tube, and channel. If I can't get that right, there's no hope for me.

There's been a lot of historic aircraft activity over the farm of late. I managed to catch this Catalina cruising along, probably for a full stop at Duxford. There's a couple of Spitfires locally and a Mustang. Tiger Moths, Harvards, and Stearmans are regular passers-by - and noisy enough to give you time to reach for your camera.

Talking of cameras, I decided the other day to print a picture from my computer. The new solid-state hard drive is installed and performing well. Not so some of the programes; that much is clear.