The Surgeon General might well determine that a quick sandwich can lead to all sorts of eating disorders if you make your bread with 50% rye and 50% spelt flour. There's a few walnut pieces in there and some olive oil from a friend's garden in Italy but I don't know if these ingredients make a huge difference - the rye flour is, I think, the key. Anyway, it's very difficult to leave the bread alone; the texture's just right and it's seriously delicious.

The work on the turtle deck continued with the coarse wood filler

The next lot of filler will be the fine car stuff and a coat of either matt black or grey will reveal any anomalies in the surface. While the car was outside, I laid a piece of ply over the scuttle to see if the line was about right.

Then a look from the three-quarter rear (the view most people will have as I roar past them).

So that's looking good so far. The cheat line on the turtle deck won't actually follow the line of the frame, it'll be a more gentle curve down starting at the centre of the rear wheel to reflect the line of the wing.

Then I spent a few minutes putting the door handle on but that was a waste of time because, the next day, Counsel turned up and pointed out that it was the wrong way round. A left hand door is usually opened with the left hand - something I hadn't quite grasped (so to speak) - so I had to fit the other lock of the pair.

Fortunately the locks are just mirror images of each other and share three of the four mounting holes I'd drilled in the wood. There's an extra hole where the other handle went through but I'll plug that and nobody will ever know.

I had to remove some of the mechanism to make everything work (you have to reach over the side to open the door) but I've preserved the bits in case I want to put the interior handle back on at some stage. Then it was time to reassemble what I now know to be a boot repairing machine. I don't know what role it played in the repair scheme but an identical machine with flat rollers and a blade in the middle of the gap, split hides into veneers.

I always take photographs before I take anything apart but when I reassembled this machine, the photographs weren't to hand and it took me almost an hour to get it back together again. It looks simple enough but as it's hand-finished to a large extent, all the tapered pins are individually fitted and needed to go back exactly where they came from and also, the hand crank fell into three pieces and needed brazing back together again. Then I spent some time puzzling over the fact that I had an extra gear and nowhere to put it until  it dawned on me that I hadn't yet added the top roller.

Sometimes I can be the perfect oaf.