Brief Description: Cutting Baffles To Match Cowling Contour - Part 01
The baffles on the top are left about 1-2" too tall. This is to allow you to cut them down to a contour that will exactly match the underside of the top cowling less about 3/8" or so. When I first put the top cowling down over the freshly installed baffles, I found that I was sitting about 1.5" from being able to get the side pins between the top and bottom cowling pieces.
But where do you start when trying to make this contour? There isn't really enough room to get your hand up underneath the cowling to mark a line, and even if you could that wouldn't really give you the exacting contour. A while back I had seen where a guy had used paper clips to mark the contour, so off to Walmart I went to buy 5 boxes of large-sized clips. I placed them like little solders right next to each other all the way around the top of the metal baffling pieces.
Once that was done, I put the top cowling down on top of them and then applied equal pressure all the way around and noted that I could feel the paper clips yielding underneath, and the cowling came down maybe 1/2" or so from its initial perch atop the clips. When I removed the cowling, much to my jubilation, I found a nearly perfect contour representation of the underside of the cowling pressed into my paper clip army!
Looking around at all of the paper clips, I noted that the largest non-gap was about 3/4". I cut a piece of sheet metal to act as a template and the proceeded to draw a mark on the baffles at the 3/4" distance at each and every one of the paper clips. The theory was that this would then represent the contour of the cowling mimicked by the top of the paper clips. I removed all of the paper clips then and was left with a nice dotted line all the way around the top of the baffling.
