There were a couple of jobs to do that I'd put off for ages because I thought they were going to throw up all sorts of difficulties. Whilst in Belgium, I resolved that on my return I would get them out of the way.

I'd discovered previously that where the handbrake lever was mounted, I'd not allowed enough clearance for the full travel of the lever, and the clevis joint was catching on the hole in the scuttle wall.

I experimented with altering the bottom of the lever, but that created an awkward, out-of-line cable run, a recipe for problems in the future.

The solution was to move rearward the cable's outer attachment block. I'll tack the new bracket in place when I have a welder to hand.

With my cable woes out of the way, the last job was to stop the ratchet cam from moving. A long ex-Slingsby glider bolt passed through a drilling to the inside of the chassis rail and the quadrant held in place by a bronze spacer, did the trick. It remains only to cut and attach the cable to the clevis joint - probably the trickiest part of the operation.

The accelerator pedal's axle was still flopping about, so I turned up another spacer, this time in steel, added a special flat-sided washer and popped a split pin into the existing hole in the shaft.

A Riley chum is lending me a set of RME wings to copy. The early RM front wings were quite plain and bulbous. Riley later introduced a peak longitudinally along the centreline. This addition improved the look considerably and I'll be doing the same. It may also prove a useful division in making up the panels in sections.

I know I must get back to the wiring (I can't quite remember where I'd got to) but in Belgium I'd begun to work up some sketches for the radiator cowl. The circular opening at the top will house The Special Builder's Breakfast Club badge and I'm thinking that it would be fun to fill the gaps in the badge with a semi-opaque substance and put a light behind it - à la Wolseley radiator badge.

Coincidentally, the artist and illustrator, Teun Berserik, who I'm honoured to have dip into these pages, had, as I was playing with the pencils on the bench, asked when I was going to 'put a face' to the car.

Let's face it, cardboard and Photoshop are indispensable.