With hopes of finishing the heat control baffle today, I went outside and cleaned all the primer off these parts. I had thought about leaving it on, but knew I would be using some grease or LPS to lubricate this sliding baffle and I was worried the primer would get sticky and bind up the mechanism. Thus all these parts are going to remain bare. I'm not too worried about corrosion since (with the heat) there won't be any moisture accumulating in these parts.

With everything else ready for assembly, it was time to bend the louvers. Van's says to just clamp a piece of angle along the base of the louver and bend them by hand. That worked pretty well, but the long louvers were hard to bend. Additionally, I put a slight kink on one of the already bent louvers when I accidentally clamped my angle on it while setting up for another louver. It's not bad, just isn't as nice as the others now.

Louver bending complete. I bent the ones on the face at 45 degrees. The ones on the sides were bent out to 30 degrees.

After riveting everything together, I tried the baffle out. It didn't slide very well until I sprayed it down with some LPS-2. That got it sliding pretty well. It's still not perfect, but I think it'll be fine. Here's the open position.

And here's the closed position. You can see that it doesn't completely close all the louvers, but it's probably at least 80% closed which I think will be good enough. Oh, and I posted a little YouTube video of the mechanism in action.