I’ve been a bit busy prepping for Christmas and New Years as I’m heading out of town to my daughter’s for Christmas and then on to Nashville and the mountains of Tennessee to ring in the New Year with Jess.

Yes, between my non-build shenanigans and the cure time for the Toyota FPIG glue on the baffles, it’s taking a number of iterations to get these baffles on.  The current cold weather doesn’t help and the crazy machinations required to pin each individual baffle to its respective cylinder for cure is also somewhat of a gargantuan feat each round.

Case in point: Note the insane amount of dunnage required to both the secure the aft left baffle to cylinder #1 while at the same time ensuring that nothing on the engine gets damaged either.

Here’s a low-angle shot of the baffle (that is pretty much hidden from view from all the wood blocking) going onto the aft side of cylinder #1.

In the same manner, here is the baffle for the front side of cylinder #4 glued and secured in place.

And this is how that looks from the aft side of the engine.

I just simply didn’t have time to machine the cylinder #2 standoff supports yet, but will get to it my next major outing in the shop.  As par usual, after I grabbed these shots I set up a heat lamp under each side of the engine pointing up and then covered the top of the engine to keep the heat in during the baffle glue cure.

In addition, I did actually get the baffle installed on the front side of cylinder #3 last night.  I thought I had a pic of that but didn’t and consequently completely forgot about it in yesterday’s blog writeup.  I’ll get a pic of it for tomorrow’s post.

Pressing forward… slowly!