Stripping out the reclining chair motor was a simple task and revealed an Acme thread in the linear actuator. With that made into a simple shaft, a direct or geared drive would be simple.

My lathe didn't have all the right accessories to keep the shaft steady and turn the thread off accurately, so a quick trip to Chumley with a bag of sausages sorted that out and also furnished me with a couple of bits of 8mm plate and some hefty angle from the scrap bin to make the motor mount.

With the motor and transformer back together, I discovered it ran too fast, but luckily, I had a pair of 2:1 reduction gears in store. It was still too fast, so I've ordered a 24v speed controller with reverse function to replace the existing hand control.

The stand was welded up with bits from the come-in-handy department. All I've got to do is secure the motor to the mount - the trickiest bit because it's all plastic. Tie-wraps may play a part in that exercise.

In the process of reshaping the model I began to wonder whether the front wing was right. Both examples work though the top wing I find a bit lumpen. The lower wing works better with the rear wing but starts to look a touch 'applied'. I'll think on that before I do any drastic surgery. I also need to do something about the pointy bit above the windscreen.

Hats off to Leon who spent a day polishing his Special. I sometimes start on the Hillman - one wing is shinier than the other - and soon give up.

In my favourite supermarket, there was on offer a negative and slide scanner. I used to have one, but it became obsolete when XP went out of the window - so to speak. I snapped up one of the few then remaining kits and at home, loaded the software disc into the CD-ROM drive. As usual, there were some initial frustrations culminating in the drive taking umbrage and locking itself up for two days before telling me the programme was incompatible with Windows 10. I was on the phone at the time the message flashed up on the screen and, in my fury, pulled the USB cable out of the back of the computer with such force that the end of the cable hit me in the eye, scratching the retina and piercing a blood vessel. The disc compartment still refused to open. This last inconvenience translated into the computer's general slowdown and, in conjunction with a Windows update, a refusal to reboot. The temptation to lob the computer from my office window to the concrete below - as I'd done with my idiot printer - was almost overwhelming. However, with the aid of kitchen knife and small screwdriver, I calmly removed the back of the screen - it's an all-in-one affair - extracted the CD-ROM drive and recovered the CD. Guess what - on reboot, the new scanner and software performed faultlessly. How does that work?