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A beautiful, brilliant, puzzle ... but yet again the final step is odd. If the preamble had said "must each receive digits" rather than "a digit" the completed picture would be accurate. These things always finish on The Appropriate Day, not the day before. What to do?

Cockie, you're way ahead of me!

I've done about 20 clues, no idea how to enter them. I'm puzzled, in particular, by the fact that 1ac (presumably) seems to be normal, with OILY as the extra word, so it occupies 10 cells. But then the final Across clue only has 6 letters, so how does the 180 symmetry work?

Thoughts please

Dylan,
1 across doesn't have an extra word. Look up the definition.
Have a good look at the answers you've got like 1 across and you should spot the theme.

Thanks, Caphrist. I've now twigged the theme. There still seems to be a problem, though, as I have 1Ac as 1 special cell+4 letters, thus taking 5 cells altogether, which is not the same as the final Across. Am I missing something- eg does 1 Ac collapse to just 2 special cells?

Hi, Dylan,

There's no problem - the last across clue contains a two-letter thematic cell, plus four single-letter cells, so uses five cells in all. So it matches the first across clue, which has a six-letter thematic cell plus four single-letter cells, again using five cells in all.

This was a bit of a slog to begin with, requiring a fair bit of cold solving, but fortunately I found the clues for the top half of the puzzle more manageable, and most of the extra words were in these clues, so the theme emerged relatively quickly. It's still taken the best part of five hours, though!

OK wintonian, but how did you complete the final step? (See my original post.) f we put in one digit in each of the two blank squares we are left with a representation of an object finishing a day early, surely.

Cockie,

The Wikipedia article for the thematic object suggests that it ends on the day before, not the day itself (though many commercial versions of the object go on to the day itself).

So I entered the first digit of the number coming immediately after those used to replace the thematic groups of letters in one of the two blank cells and the second digit in the other cell. There is a well-known four-letter contraction that is thematically consistent with the two-digit number, and this is the first word of one of the down clues, but this goes beyond what the preamble requires.

Thanks. I thought I knew enough about this subject not to need to refer to Wiki - but now I know better.

Not got too far yet but think I sense the theme. Can someone confirm that the clues either contain an extra word or are thematic i.e. There are no normal clue/entry pairs? I also assume that the numbers are not all unches?

Hi, rrrobbo,

Yes, every clue either has an extra word or its answer needs to be thematically modified. Each of the cells containing a thematic group of letters is checked, and the group of letters appears in the same order in both the relevant across and down answers. This helps with locating answers in the grid.