A few years ago I helped my friend deliver his 1986 O'Day 272 from Cape Cod to Bristol RI. This boat wasn't an LE but it had a lot of reefing control lines and halyards that came over the cabin and through the clutches. I don't think that he had feeder plates on his mast. What he had was thinner diameter lines attached in between the sail slides and the luff of the sail which allowed slack to be left in that lower part of the sail when it's reefed. The sail had two sets of reefing points and the reefing could be done from the cockpit. I'm not really all that familiar with this system, but I think that it was designed to relax the tension on the foot of the sail without removing the sail slides. It seemed to me to be as simple as removing the lower sail slugs from the cringles, and attaching a thin diameter line to the top slug and runing it down through the cringles and slugs and back to the cockpit. What you have is something that resembles a shoe lace on a shoe. This may work if you can't find the plates. Check with Rudy Nickerson of D&R Marine. Rudy has the O'Day parts as well as the knowledge of these boats.