The last couple of days I've been working on the pieces that close off the baffles at the front. I managed to finish drilling the left piece tonight, after a long hard battle. It was a royal pain in the you-know-what to drill some of the holes. You have to have the various baffle parts in position on the engine while you drill the holes, otherwise it is pretty much guaranteed the holes won't match up when you put them on the engine.

It would have been easy if I was willing to pull off the prop and flywheel, but I went through enough trouble to get the prop on, so I'm darned if I'm going to pull it off now. I finally managed to cobble together a way to get at enough holes with my angle drill that I could drill them in place, pull it off, cleco it back together and drill the rest of the holes on the bench.

Read on for more.

I've still got to drill the right side front piece, and then trim both pieces at the top to clear the upper cowl.

I don't even want to count how may pieces are required to do all the baffling. Suffice it to say that it is quite the jig-saw puzzle. The big square hole is where the air filter goes.

This shot is looking the left baffle front piece and left baffle floor from the right side.

A view from underneath. Those big curved pieces hanging down wrap around the fins on the cylinder and head to force the air to exit through a small gap, keeping the air in contact with the fins for as long as possible to maximize the amount of heat extracted.