Today I started off by cutting out a quick rough mockup of the topside plate for the left exhaust pipes’ securing bracket.  I’ll fine tune it and dial it in as I get closer to actually constructing the bracket.

Here are a couple more shots of the left side exhaust pipe bracket mockup.

I then embarked on the slow arduous process of cutting out templates (here I’m using a paper towel) for the aft left corner baffle seals…

Then placing the baffle seals, drilling the rivet holes, and test fitting the baffle seal segments.

Once I was sold on the baffle seal fit —this is just the top aft corner seal— I would punch the rivet holes in the baffle seals with a leather punch.  These oversized holes allow for more movement of the seal and reportedly mitigates the seals from splitting due to vibration.

Again, the machinations of fitting the baffle seal segments to the aluminum baffle, as well as integrating them to each other, then checking if they close up the gaps with the top cowling installed, is a very iterative process: with cowls constantly going on and coming off, with nearly all the CAMLOCs installed to check final baffle seal vs cowl contour.

That all being said, here I’m checking the clearance of the #2 CAMLOC of the top cowling with the bottom of the aft left corner angle reinforcement strip (blue, red pointer) that is hanging down below the aluminum baffle corner.

Although the reinforcement strip didn’t really create any clearance issues, I trimmed it at an angle to match the contour of the top cowl’s interior lip, and then cut, shaped and created another fascia piece to cover what would be exposed baffle seal material down in that lower corner.  Clearly it also helps reinforce the 2 overlapping baffle segments down in this corner.

Here we have all the aft left corner baffle seals in place, minus one small segment (see next pic).  The V-shaped gap on the side is to allow the baffle seals to seal both above and below the oil door opening cable conduit, respectively.

I then once again mounted the top cowling to double check my work.  As an added layer to seal up any gaps allowing any air through or around the oil door opening cable conduit, the small baffle seal segment (with green tape and red pointer) will be mounted on the forward side of the V-shaped split, filling in that gap.

It was quite late and although I didn’t reach my goal of actually getting the aft left corner baffle seals installed, I thought better of pressing forward tonight in order to ensure that I could double-check my work tomorrow in that all air paths are blocked off.

I’ll add that I ended the evening by taking a good look at my bottom spark plug wires’ routing as well as the EGT cable routing.  I’ve got a good mental plan on how I want those run and will document some mounting tabs that I’ll need to make up.

Speaking of EGTs… Yesterday I installed first the standard EGT probe into the cylinder #2 exhaust pipe and assessed its clearance.  It was quite acceptable (clearly not quite as good as if I used the compression fitting EGT probe).  Today I did the same on cylinder #3.  Same story.  So my plan on EGT probes AT THIS TIME is to use all standard probes and upgrade when able (task complete… for now!).

Pressing forward…. painstakingly slow at this point!