Baffling baffle blabber

For a change, I decided to work on something other than avionics, and got started on the engine baffles, which are a small puzzle of odd-shaped parts:

Cylinder 6 baffles sitting in place

The left aft case baffle is pretty hard to get in place, but I realized that if I just bent the little tab a bit forward, it clears the engine mount and falls in place:

Attempting to insert the left aft case baffle

Bent tab which makes the left aft case easier to install

It was then time to make the baffles fit around the cylinder head gaskets, which required quite a bit of trimming:

Cylinder baffle marked for trimming

Cylinder baffle marked for trimming

After a lot of trimming and deburring, I got them all to fit nicely around the cylinder head gaskets:

Trimmed cylinder baffle sitting around the cylinder gasket

I also match-drilled the oil cooler bracket (I don't really understand why it's called that, since the oil cooler goes on the firewall):

Oil cooler bracket clecoed in place

Oil cooler bracket match-drilled to the aft baffle

I also detected a bit of interference with the System32 injector, which I'll have to trim the baffle for:

Interference between the baffle and the #5 injector

The next steps on the baffle require the cowling to be in place (to trim the top of the baffles), which in turn requires the propeller to be installed...so this section is now on hold until all that happens.

Time lapse:


Total cowl baffle time: 13.4h

Checklist editor

I was not very happy the existing options to edit checklists for the G3X (for one, because they were OS-specific), so I ended up making my own, web-based, and published it as open source here (it's usable directly from GitHub pages, just click the highlighted link after reading the disclaimer).

N425RP's checklist on the checklist editor

This was a fun little project, and I got to exercise some of what I knew about Angular and Typescript (and, as a backend developer, ugh, CSS). It also seemed pretty easy to do, so I added support for other checklist formats, like Dynon, AFS (almost the same as Dynon), and GRT.

This is a very first version, and as I said I'm not a web developer, so bug reports, pull requests, or any type of feedback, are more than welcome!