Another busy week where, apart from filling and sanding the revised shape dashboard, I've been doing jobs for other people.

There were 160 of these repeat stops for the Norfolk print tables. Chumley put them all in one box but I had to decant them into four boxes to carry them to the car - anything over 25kg is a struggle nowadays.

Much lighter work was re-joining this clock pendulum rod to its spring steel thingummy which itself is pinned to the top of the clock's mechanism. Making a 0.5mm tapered pin took three goes - mainly because I can't see as well as I did when I was a teenager. Winter, when you're all fingers and thumbs, is also not the season for this sort of fiddly work.

The Great Collector's 6/80 had a broken dashboard switch and I thought one of my spare Riley ones would replace it. Not so. The Wolseley switches have a much shorter body though their internals are much the same. Mr Holmes obliged with a couple of expired switches out of which I could make one good one.

All I had to do was drill out the copper rivet which held the now rotted away spring steel pin return device, drill out the rusted in pin and replace with the bits from my spare Riley switch.

Then a chum rang to say he needed some help getting a new oak beam into place underneath an upstairs window. When you've been on the Working At Heights course and are used to the excellent working practices employed offshore, climbing up a swaying scaffold tower and heaving a 50kg oak beam into a very tight spot with nothing to hang on to - the sort of thing we did without even thinking in The Olden Days - it makes you wonder how we got away with it.

The aluminium welding work I'm doing at the moment involves fabricating these hinges. The trouble is that there are too many parts to weld and the chances of distortion even with an assembly jig, are very high - in fact it's inevitable, which in turn makes assembling the wings to the centre section of the rig irksome and involves some tweaking.

I've been toying with redesigning the hinges with fewer parts though this would involve some CNC machining. I'll have to cost the operation before I make up a prototype.

My ali welding is improving and I've found that preheating with a roofer's torch helps enormously, even on short bits.