I determined that the lower inboard nutplate was indeed in contact with a cooling fin and when I ran a bolt into the nutplate, it pushed the baffle to the rear—so, this won’t work. I checked on VAF and some said it was ok to grind the fin, but another said just move the nutplate up. Why didn’t I think of that? Not wanting to drill any more holes than necessary, I can use the upper rivet hole of the bottom nutplate as the lower rivet hole of a miniature nut plate. This moves the bolt hole up .6”—will have to drill a new hole in the oil cooler flange, but that should be ok. The holes in the FF-713 baffle doubler don’t match up with the holes in the flange of the baffle brace—so I cut off the flange. I drilled a piece of ¾” angle to the aft baffle, then drilled it to the baffle brace. Hopefully this angle and the 1” angle added to the flange of the side baffle will prevent any future issues with cracking of the #4 cylinder baffles that seems to be an issue on some of the RV-8’s.
