March 19, 2005

Today was a firewall forward day. I’ve been putting off the baffles for so long now, it’s time I just bit the bullet and got on with them. Yesterday, I went out and bought a brake press so I could finally bend metal. It’s not a brilliant one, but it was fairly cheap. It will do for what I need it for. I needed one with removable tabs so I could bend a box form. Unfortunately, when they loaded it into the back of the Explorer, they crashed the fork lift truck into the bottom of my tailgate. Great. Now I have to wait for their head office to call me to see what’s going to happen about fixing it. There’s always something.

Baffles. The first task was to make a box form to fill in the step above the oil cooler. Most builders seem to do this, as it neatens up the flexible seal routing. It took me a while to figure out the bending brake and how to get good bends from it. Once I had it sussed though, it worked out pretty well. There was some obligatory cursing during the whole process, but generally it turned out pretty well! Clayton came by to witness the events of the day too, and to lend a helping hand when I needed it. Cheers mate!

Here I am (scruffy git) having a celebratory cup o’ tea after completing the rear left baffle. The only thing I need to do to this is rivet on the spacer to the mounting hole closest to the engine mount. Doing that will make it a lot less fiddly to assemble this thing to the engine.

Here is the whole ensemble on the engine. It’s a little tricky to get it on, but you can wiggle it in there.

Here’s the oil cooler that this baffle has to support. It’s a Stewart Warner 8406R. Seems to be THE oil cooler of choice. Them’s some steel fittings waiting to be torqued up in there. It also looks like one of the flanges closest to the engine mount will have to be trimmed down. This is quite common on RV’s too.

We progressed on to the right side baffles. I really wanted to get the front left baffle floor done today, but after reading PH-VII’s construction log, I saw that they mentioned Dave Parson’s snorkle had a much better fit. It looks like there’s a part out there that will work out of the box. I was expecting to do some cutting and shutting with mine, since it’s for a 200hp engine, but if there truly is one for the 180hp engines, I’ll swap it out. I’ll call Van’s tomorrow to confirm it.

As you can see, most of the rivetting is done now on this side. I still haven’t attached it to the front floor. I’m wondering if I’ll have to make another floor, because I cut this one quite short, anticipating not having to cut too much off the cowl for the air intake. Turns out I might have to cut more off than I first thought. I need to wait for the new snorkel though first to be really sure.

Here, we put the angle reinforcement on the right rear baffle. It’s coming together slowly. It’s unbelievable how labour intensive these things are. Nine hours, and that’s all we did! Wow.