Thanks, bit the bullet and went for it.
N3DS 9.6 to 9.2. Working fine. Had the memory card issues but working fine.
Time for a rest before I move on!
Thanks for the help guys!
Not looked at the cwf's yet but is one of them noob friendly/feature rich?
Rxtools is the only cfw for n3ds that's feature rich, but does not support 10.5 emunand yet.
Cakesfw and reinand do support 10.5, but are minimalist cfws and you'll need to install a few things.