Heavens what an effort. After a long time I’d done very little, and really thought that I’d have to cheat and look at the website, but eventually it all worked out, although there are some that I’m not comfortable with. I’m writing this blog without looking at the answers on the site, so maybe some of this is wrong. But now that I’ve done it all, I think it’s a pretty good crossword, with nice clues and little that I feel I can grumble about.

I took a little more than an hour to complete this puzzle which I would rate as ‘above-average’ in difficulty. My entering one or two wrong answers initially did not help matters. I got 4ac first and did not read any Down clue until I solved some 10 or 12 in the same set (this may be the reason for total time taken but fast filling-in is never my aim). The left vertical half proved to be difficult, more so the SW corner. The last to fall were  29ac and 24dn.

Across

1 ENSURE - (-c)ensure     

10 TROUSSEAU - t,Rousseau  

11 REPEL - rev. of ‘leper’

12 RUDE  - (-p)rude   

13 MINDREADER - min(dread)er

15 LAMPREY - lam, prey - This gave me a lot of trouble. ‘Buffet’ is a noun in surface reading but does a switcheroo as a verb in wordplay.

19 UNITED - un (’a’ in French), ited* (anag. of ‘diet’)

21 PROPOSE - prop, (-h)os

23 ACQUAINTED - ac(quaint)e, d

25 RACE  - r, ace (a second ace in succession!)

27 SWIFT - s(w.)ift

28 DECEPTIVE - dec(ep.)tive* (anag. of ‘evicted’) - Another clue that eluded me for a long while even though I knew the container, as deriving the abbr. ep. from ‘epistle’ (letter) involves some mental jousting.

29 MISPRINT - MI (abbr. of Military Intelligence)-sprint

30 STINGY - sting, y - To derive ’sting’ from ‘upset’  we have to go to the outer reaches of our mind.

Down

2 SWORDSMAN -  s.,wordsman - a rare, but legitimate, abbreviation for ’succeeded’ and a seemingly new but actually very old term for a verbalist.

5 ECUADOR - anag. of ‘caroued’ after removing ’s’ (’old Bob’)

7 TEPID  - te(pi)d, ‘pi’ being the mathematical term for “the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle”.

21 PIERCE - pie(r.)ce - A third clue that took some thinking! I am not quite happy with the surface reading of the clue; I can understand someone filing a report but not ‘filling’ a ‘report’.

22 BALSAM - balsa, m

24 QUITS - When one says ‘quits’ one declares even with another. In wordplay I think there is deletion of ‘o’ from ‘quoits’ (game) but I am yet to see the full implication of ‘half-hearted’.

http://picasaweb.google.com/fifteensquared

Edit:  as Rishi points out in his comments, the photos could do with some captions to identify who’s who. Anyone can add a comment to any photo so if you recognise someone or if you’re in a photo then feel free to add your own caption. Be nice though. 

Straightforward enough except for 26ac which took me ages to sort out and may well be wrong.

Bit of a mix-up, so an emergency late blog. Please forgive any mistakes!

Wonderful puzzle from Ploy, but you would have to be a REAL anorak (as in trainspotter) to solve it without the use of Mr Google!

I beavered away at the middle letters of extra words until I had Mogul, Prairie, Atlantic and, by implication and guesswork, Pacific. After a number of false starts, (all four seemed to have some connection with oysters, but oyster Googles went nowhere) I eventually put all four words into Google as a last resort. It came up with the classification of American Steam Locomotives by wheel layout!!!

I couldn’t really believe this, but after a few more letters appeared, all the various words that appeared were locomotive types. Each had a wheel layout stated as three figures: [leading wheels]-[driving wheels]-[trailing wheels]. The central part of the puzzle (the white squares) appeared to have a zero rather than a letter O, so I counted the rows and columns and there were 8 three digit combinations. So it was a “numberword” in the middle of a crossword.

The “numberword” was defined by the given zero which had to be in both 260 and 440. After one false start, I fitted them all in as follows:

Solving time: I dread to think!!