A safe way to remove the fork tube plug is to remove the bracket (hex) bolt, and loosen the bottom-tree pinch bolt. Slide the fork tube down far enough to get a wrench on the plug flats, then tighten the pinch bolt, and loosen the fork tube plug.
Then loosen the pinch bolt and raise the fork tube until the top of the plug is about a 1/2" away from the bottom edge of the top tree. Tighten the pinch bolt again. Then (wearing safety glasses) turn the fork tube plug out with a thin jawed wrench. The tube plug will snap upwards and into the top tree. Don't get your finders in the way of the tube plug. You will lose skin! (You can see between the spring coils - no baffle assembly.)
Then, I checked the ride of a pair of OEM forks that have baffles, none of the OEM shims, none of the OEM spacers, 7 oz. of fork oil:
I rolled a rigid frame w/ rebuilt OEM forks down the street and compressed the forks pretty good coming up the driveway. They don't pound with the normal compression they'd normally get while riding or when you pull on the front brake lever to stop.
I think because my VT forks don't have the baffle stacks, that it could be why the VT forks pound more than the OEM set.
Look at the baffle assembly and you'll see how the bottom baffle disc has a 1/2 radius slot cut out for it. The other discs have the same cut out, but the cut outs are assembled at 180 degrees to each other.
The bottom baffle is backed up by a spring to rebound when the (solid) bottom disc gets hit by the slug of fluid (the top of the damper rod is solid) on compression (and water and fluid do not compress... but they are fluid).
So, the fluid is looking for a place to escape and the labyrinth of off-set baffle discs lets the fluid meander through the discs.... and the spring on the rod will move backwards as the fluid pressure increases and "dampens" the hit of the tube when it travel-stops. The shock is when the damper assembly shock-waves against the (0.004") free play at the slider tube snap ring (46172-48). [Assuming your slider busings are not worn, which cause other problems.]
This information is found on page 2F-10 of the '59-69 Service Manual, to wit:
So, the shims were used to adjust free play between the snap ring and lower bushing. The spacer first showed up in the 1949-57 Spare Parts Catalog as (46045-49) and was used from '50-53 and was then removed from future service. Then the spacer showed up again, albeit briefly, as (12A) for '65-66, in the 1959-69 Service Manual on pg. 2F-3, but with no part number given and it never made it into the 1958-68 Parts Catalog.Check clearance between snap ring and lower bushing. If clearance exceeds .004 in.,remove snap ring, gasket and lower bushing and insert additional shims to bring to a maximum of .004 in. clearance.
The engineers at Tedd Cycle, Inc. improved, and made affordable (by eliminating the drain plug which would have required more hand work to produce) the Glide forks. Those rascals didn't include the (tube plug) baffle assembly, so what's new?, but there it is and the forks will function as well as OEM, if in fact the slamming problem is eliminated by baffles.