Several months ago I saw an e-mail list post about a gap between the right aft cylinder and the aft baffle wall. I looked at my baffling, and sure enough, there was an area at the base of the cylinder with a gap an inch wide. A whole bunch of air could escape through that gap rather than going between the cylinder fins. Not good. There was a tab on the baffle that was supposed to have been bent over to fill that gap, but I missed it.

I decided that it would be a major pain in the butt to remove that baffle piece to bend the tab, so I decided to save some time and effort by bending it in place. But, there was very poor access, so I was only able to get it bent a little bit. I found a short piece of wood to use as a tool, and managed to get it bent a bit more, but still not enough. I probably spent three hours fiddling with this problem over several different evenings.

Friday morning I finally bit the bullet and decided to simply remove that piece of baffle, rather than try to bend the tab in place. It only took about 20 minutes to remove the baffle, five minutes to bend the tab, and five more minutes to get the baffle back in place. Except for one attachment screw which was behind the oil filler tube.

Try as I might, I couldn't get that screw back in place. The oil filler tube was safety wired in place, so I didn't want to remove it. I fiddled with that screw for about half an hour, using pliers, Phillips bits on a universal joint, one finger from each hand - no way could I get it in place.

This afternoon I decided to remove the oil filler tube so I could get a straight shot at that screw. Five minutes to remove the tube, one minute to put the screw in, and ten minutes to reinstall the oil filler tube. I would have saved several hours of screwing around if I had simply decided to do this job the correct way, rather than trying to use short cuts. I spent needless hours trying to bend that tab in place, and trying to replace that screw with the oil filler tube in place.

I am glad that I decided to install nutplates at critical places in the baffles. The basic design has the baffles being completely riveted together, which means that they can't be removed without drilling out rivets. I can simply remove some screws to disassemble my baffles.