Crossword Help Forum
Forum Rules

Nightmare. We had 16d, 15a both wrong, all figured out now. But when did wrong answers both fit all crossers like that? Never happened until now. Thanks again.

Parsing now seems obvious. Answer came up even though I put an O for the I. Thanks Havermonkey.

All done but it took ages for me to get going as I had an anagram of 'make neats r' for 14d early on and cursed the setter for having it!

As I said earlier, there are many other elements that are 25a, copper is merely one of them. That said, back in the day I was an organic rather than inorganic chemist!

Yes RedPete, but my gripe is that copper isn't just 25a.

Chrise,
Maybe that's where the "maybe" applies? Beginning to look like my COD

I came to the forum looking for help with LOI 25a, and Rogissimo's first post gave me the nudge I needed to think of an alternative answer. I'd already checked dictionary for any unobvious meanings of "nick" and "bint" to pair up.

I knew the word of 27a, but like some above I'm puzzled by the parsing of 1d: how does "See" fit in?

17a was a word I had to invent and then check, New to me.

FOI was 9a. CoD perhaps the neat 11d. I had to use the Crossword Solver for a few words, like 20a, but could parse the clever clues once I had the answers.

RedPete @66
See mine @27

FINALLY got there (even 25...needed all the hints on that, thank you!)
1D - why is this "see christian member" not just "christian"?

See is the imperative form of the verb and is telling the solver what the result of the wordplay will be.
It is there because otherwise there would need to be an s on 'abstain' to make the verb singular and agree grammatically with 'Christian member'. That would make the wordplay invalid as there would be an extra s

'Find' and 'discover' are two other words that setters use to avoid this problem