I've been beavering away on the cooling baffles the last few nights. I've been making progress, but I've still got a lot of messing around to do. I don't have nearly as much clearance between the left side baffles and the cowl as I would like, so I am agonizing over whether I should just press on or if I need to do some sort of major cowl mod. I think this issue arrises from my desire to fit the upper cowl fairly low to allow for eventual engine sagging in the mounts.

I've got the baffles trimmed a the sides and back - tonight I started working on the horizontal floor at the front left side. This piece of horizontal floor has to fit closely to several other baffle pieces, as well as match up to the bottom of the air inlet in the cowling. And it holds the filter for the induction air. The bottom line is this piece has got to be trimmed and fitted to match up several other parts, and you can't tell how much to trim it until you get it in place, and you can't get it in place until you trim it. Great fun.

I had a great plan to mount my oil cooler on the back left side of the engine baffles, (I wanted to copy Randy Lervold's oil cooler mount and I managed to acquire some aluminum channel to fabricate the mount. Well, now that I've got the rear baffles trimmed to fit under the cowling, I discovered that things are very different with my IO-360A than they are with Randy's O-360. The oil cooler will have to go a bit lower and further inboard than I expected, and it will hit the engine mount if I use the aluminum channel I've got. So, I need to rethink the whole oil cooler mount concept.