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I may regret this as I haven't completely finished, but I think this is really superb. The construction of both the grid and the clues is astonishing. The clues all work brilliantly despite the constraints put upon them.

I have a finished grid as I did an 'Andy P'. Once you have the 'several techniques' it is pretty easy to deduce the last couple of steps without actually doing the 29d.

But I am pretty sure I know how to do the 29d and will hopefully finish this morning. The crucial K****** is proided I believe, no GWIT. You just have to follow the instructions very carefully.

Just astonishingly good.

TT - you are only minutes from a solution.

There are easily found online 7 29rs, and 3! is only six, so there’s not a huge amount of brute forcing to try the permutations.

Unbelievably I think I've jointly cracked this with a fellow contributor to this forum. My only remaining problem is finding out how to change the unclued entry into the word I now have in the grid,

hotelwhisky, thanks for the encouragement, I only wish it were true!

3! is indeed 6, but there are many possibilities for the (7) and even a strict reading of the modified preamble doesn't give me much of a clue as to which I'm supposed to use.

tt, if you are still stuck there is a more explicit discussion of the theme on the Facebook Listener forum.

TT - have you literally replaced the '5' with the '4 7 3 4' and thought about what that whole revised sentence implies?

Bravo, Shark! Astonishing!

Interesting puzzle with some fun construction. I never would have interpreted the preamble in the way that it needs to be interpreted without reading through the messages on this forum for a nudge. I admit that tainted my liking of the puzzle.

I can see nothing in the puzzle that indicates the needed K?????? is itself ALSO a 7 variant. I only obtained that information by reading through this forum. Without that information there are multiple possible forenames in the grid that may have created something.

I believe the intent is to submit the puzzle with the 29'd version of the unnumbered entry. But I don't see this explicitly written in the preamble. So who's to say.

I respectfully disagree cypherhouse. The k****** has to meet the two conditions specified. You are steered towards a word that meets these conditions. There may be others (although I doubt it), but it would be very odd not to try the one you've been given first.

And you'd have to take a particularly contrary view of the preamble not to conclude you need the 29'd unnumbered entry.

To each their own Smellyharry. I do not recall being "given" any such k?????? at any point. Perhaps I missed it. It was my understanding that the solver is meant to obtain it on their own.

It is only my point that without the knowledge of the category, I found well over 100 possible entries for 1A. That is even with the assumption that all down entries will be in Chambers (ie no proper nouns) and 1A is a single word. So the first criteria that must be met does not accomplish much to narrow the scope of searching.

The second criteria also does not help as per my above comment about there being many name candidates in the grid and many potential "creators" per name.

Therefore, there is no clear path to obtain the k?????? in my opinion. One must either get lucky in choosing the right creator, or the right 1A and then use the other to verify.

I agree that it is likely intended to 29 the unnumbered entry. Though I see nothing in the preamble that would be contradicted if this weren't done. Typically this step is prefaced by a "The solver must..." or something similar if it is required for submission.