I started off today with 2 tabs left to bend on the front of the right lower aft engine baffle. Since these tabs are situated on the interior of the front edge, with an obstruction on both sides, I needed to figure out how to get the very useful bending tool into that interior edge.

My solution was to simply cut off a 3.6″ wide section of the 12″ wide metal bending tool.  This would allow me to get the wider outboard tab bent downward 90° and subsequently out of the way for then bending the narrower inboard tab down 90° as well.

I drew my cut line and grabbed my cutoff grinder and got to work.

I will say that this is a robustly thick tool as it took me a good 15 minutes to get a nice cut all the way through… but persistence paid off and here we have the 3.6″ section of the metal bending tool, or what I’ve now dubbed the “Mini metal bending tool.”

I then clamped the right lower aft engine baffle inverted on the workbench just so that the edge was hanging off, and then used the new Mini metal bending tool to bend the tab downward (up in the pic) 90°.

Here’s the end result of that bending action:

I then did the same thing for the inboard interior tab (right side in below pic) and bent it downward 90° as well.

Thus, here we have the right lower aft engine baffle with all the required tabs bent into their respective positions.

And the same for the left lower aft engine baffle… all tabs bent as needed.

I also spent a good 20 minutes on the first round of trimming the required areas I had annotated before, to get this baffle segment to fit in place correctly (I’m sure there will be more trimming sessions no doubt).

Before removing the alternator, I figured out where my safety wire runs were going to terminate.  I then made a mark at each of those 3 positions.

And then drilled those 3 holes with a small drill bit to allow for safety wiring the 2 alternator bolts and also the bolt securing the inboard bracket for the left shelf & skirt baffle.

And with that, I called it a night (I’m also slowly cleaning the rust off my plasma cutting table metal components in prep for using it in the near future!).