Well I've been doing a fair bit more reading around with the help of some useful links and a bit more digging myself, and it would seem that if my meat was spoilt before I started, then what I have been doing is not very clever
If I want to do it like this I should be pasteurising the meat at around 71 deg C, then air drying it at room temperature or higher as quickly as possible.
This would also kill off all the friendly bacteria too, so I'm not too keen on that.
The other option seems to be to cure it in the fridge overnight, or 6-10 hrs, or 2-24hrs (a few variables in there ) and dry it either at 10-16 deg C slowly, or put it in the lowest oven I can so that it dries in a few hours.
So my conclusion, which is still open to debate, is that if you are perfectly happy that you could eat the meat raw, then you can cure it at room temperature. As most of us cannot be that sure, there is a flaw in my process.
In practice, I think that so long as the meat is OK, there is nothing wrong with my method, but if I picked up a bad batch, there is no guarantee the anti-bacterial controls would kick in soon enough for it not to be a problem, so regretfully, I cannot recommend it.
Hope this helps,
Dave