... progress on the Special with a quick trip to Hartlepool to magnetise a small length of inter-array HVAC cable.

I was on the night shift and it was blinkin' brass monkeys in a tin hut without a heater.

The home of fast jet training at RAF Leeming is just up the road from Hartlepool and they're an enthusiastic bunch. We were sitting at the traffic lights when these chaps happened by.

The Harvard and its companions have reached Al-ʿUla safe and sound.

Back at home, a couple of hours with cardboard and super glue produced the nearside engine mount. I think that I might put slots in the top plate and the round bottom plate and add tabs to the upright so that they locate properly for welding.

It's always worth the extra effort to make things up in cardboard. I'm going to have a couple of extra top plates made up so that I can get the engine height exactly right. I can sandwich some anti-vibration material between the two plates as the rubber blocks have seen better days. New mounting blocks are available from Australia, but I think I can more readily adapt a common type available locally for the price of the postage if the originals fail.

And on the subject of failing, the one nut that I didn't want to be seized and shear off - of course was seized and sheared off. The upper wishbone spindle on the nearside, the side that takes all the flak from the gutter, is usually more troublesome than the offside which tends to be in the cleaner portion of the road. The spindles aren't available as a spare so I'll counter-bore and insert a new threaded portion. It's not taking any of the load, it's just locating the nut to stop the spindle falling out.

The nearside lower kingpin bush is completely shot - I've rather jumped the gun and will have to re-rig the upper wishbones to get the hub off before I can go any further. As the engine mount drawings are at the laser-cutting people, I've got a bit of time to loosen the various nuts and bolts in readiness for the complete strip down.

There's some weird stuff going on in some parts of the suspension. The top mounting bolt for the shock absorber is in several parts, ensuring that when I come to undo the bolt which appears from the book to be threaded into the big hexagon, it will shear off. One big bolt and some top-hat spacers would have been a simple and practical solution but maybe I'm missing something.

The MkVI Bentley head went on without much ado, but I reckon I lost a couple of pounds as I went around the 39 head nuts three times, gradually tightening them up to the specified 40lbs ft.

And the other day I was interrupted by the Mysterons. I notice they've gone all LED-low-voltage-save-the-planet on us - rather at odds with their usual interplanetary-war MO. I think we should be vigilant.