This week I chipped away at the baffle tension rods over a series of evenings. I didn’t actually have a die for cutting the threads, so I had to order one from Aircraft Spruce. These were fairly easy to make, and came out looking good. Some more practice with cutting threads might have helped, but I got the hang of it pretty quickly. When bending the rods I used a block of wood with a slot cut in it to stop the rod rotating, which allowed me to bend both ends of the rods in the same axis.
Installing the rods was fairly easy. I cut a few lengths of 1/4 inch tubing to help prevent chaffing, although there weren’t many areas where interference is possible. Once I had the tubing slid over the rods and positioned correctly, I used some RTV to bond the tubing onto the rod.
With new crush washers in hand I also took time to install the remaining baffle hardware, and torqued everything.
