To make this work smoothly its very important to nicely taper the front end of the hinge pin. Without sanding the front tip of the hinge pin into a nice rounded tapered shape you will wear badly on your hinges every time this is taken apart and put back together. With a nice tapered pin and some oil or grease it will last forever. With the taper I never had to use the reduced diameter hinge-pins...kinda bending the hinge-pin into the general curved shape of the cowl-side also helps.

A lot of vans guys are going to cam lock fasteners and are ditching the hinge cowl atrachment method. The hinge method does give a super clean installation, but it takes more time to remove the cowl and it is not something you want to do before flight. With camlocks you can take the top off in 30 sec and see everything, and then bolt it back on, alone in the same amount of time. With the hinge pins it can be trick with one pair of hands. But yes, literally thousands of RVs have used the hinge pin method. It is decades old.

I'm already noticing some elongation on mine from the nut plates! :( Looks like I'll be looking at some hinges soon! :D

To think how many of us want to do the opposite --- trash the hinges in favor of point connectors (like Dzus). Then again, our problem stems primarily from hinges along the aft top interface (where you are going without any connector) --- damn pin does NOT like going around round corners and requires enough insertion force to physically slide the aircraft sideways (and bent the living hell out of the pin if it slightly misaligns during insertion --- I actually replaced my original .090 dia pin with an .078 pin, which made the pin flimsy, but insertable.) Have to look into replacing my hinge (folded) with the extruded models. Thanks

How do you order the undersized hinge pins?

Good morning sir , I think the bed way to close the engine cowling is. To install the brackets. Best regards

you also need to have some thing to lock the pin in. columbia's got rid of the hole in the very front so the pin dint walk out into the prop and thats with the big pin using a smaller pin it would be easy for that pin to walk out in flight and just loose your cowl if your lucky enough to live though it.

I love this! Do you have a more detailed video on lay out etc? Thanks!!

What were all the little "silver colored particles" along the edge of the hinge mount? It looked like "metal filings"?

this guy is in la la land. This method encourages skipping looking under the cowel,

looks easy to forget to put the pin in with no visual indication that it's not there.

gee, you invented what Vans has been doing for years