Today I cut the right aft lower engine baffle out of 6061 aluminum.

Unfortunately I dove in without drilling the relief holes at the bend edges, so I had to do that after the fact on a couple of them.  Over towards the mid-right side as I was coming in from the edge the drill slipped and went across the face of the baffle, placing a decent-sized scratch on it for a few good inches.  Soooo, I’ll have to see if that buffs out.  If not, I think I have a backup plan to eliminate the scratch.

I then headed into town to pick up a sheet metal bending tool from Harbor Freight, but alas, they were sold out.  I ended up grabbing some Thai food with Jess, and then headed home with a handful of stuff from HF, but not what I had ventured out for.

After doing some online searching, I ended up ordering the sheet metal bending tool off of Amazon.

I then spent a few hours doing some research on my next steps, as well as gathering up (read 45 min looking for!) all the pieces/parts to get my drill press back online —which I haven’t used since I moved into this shop nearly 5 years ago.

A significant milestone in cutting this thing out, now to get ‘er installed.  More to come!