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Thanks malone.

I need to make more progress cracking clues.

My question was prompted by answer to 27d being ARTICLE but just having 5 cells in the grid.

Ah, OK, Sunray. 'Article' wasn't the answer to 27 D - it was just the thematic element, showing how the first part works.

Are we looking for the inventor for the thematic figure to be written under the grid?

Yes, Marca.

Thank you Malone.

I found this hard, with some very oblique clues, but grid and colouring completed now. But ... I don't see how 'sTRAPped off' (anagram?) leads to the SC part of SCAM.

Defn is "Illegally to make cash strapped". - ie poor .

Wordplay is "off clearing plunder (scoff) in the morning"

Can someone (Malone!) kindly give me a steer on this, as you know, I solve this most weeks but haven't a clue what is going on here....
I have quite a few straight clues solved but don't follow at all what people are talking about at posts 3 and 4 etc!

Lumen, I'll try to help - but I'm not sure what stage you're at! I just solved as many clues as possible. Some of the others proved more tricky, until I realised what was going on - or what was being taken out! One example...

20 Relet low-down ruin for housing. I could see Info, low-down, hidden in 'ruin for'. The 'relet' meant nothing until I saw that the 'sequence of letters' would be 'van', to form Relevant so it was actually 'Relevant low-down = info'. I think other examples have been given earlier. I spotted enough of these to know what the general theme was.

The preamble says that '...12 clues a single letter must be removed before solving'. I found those easier to spot, and the ones nearer the end of the clues indicated the second part of a phrase/thing. The examples mentioned earlier all fit the description of the first part of the phrase/object.

Is this any use?

Thanks kobnut, would never have thought of that. I found this puzzle so hard that I felt stupid coming on here to discover people had solved it with such ease. Almost all the clues seemed to me to be very obscure, not unlike the sort of thing that Sabre comes up with. Was it a weakness that you could solve and colour the grid without identifying all the conveyances?