Brief Description: Drilled long horizontal hinges to cowl
Today I drilled the long horizontal cowl hinges, which took much more time than I though. I used the wider hinge half for the bottom so I could hide the hinge eye creases. I let the hinge stay higher in the aft side from the front, but there is only a 1/16” difference. I drilled the holes into the hinge then match drilled to the cowl which was a deviation from what I did on the other hinges, those I marked the cowl. Not sure why I did this differently but with the holes centered on the hinge the lower rivets are at minimum edge distance on the lip of the cowl in places and the line of rivets slopes. This is not big deal to me as I plan to finish the cowl so the rivet head are hidden. The issue doing it this way came into play with the top half. There I needed to get a light behind the hinge to see where to drill from the outside. If the light is not directly behind the hole the spot you can see on the cowl will be off a bit, it is really tough to get a light this way on the left side since the cylinder sit so close. I took a strip of LED lights and taped them to the valve covers and hooked them up to a battery, this gave me the direct light I need to drill the holes properly. In hind sight it would have been better to measure the place I wanted the rivets along the cowl and just drilled the patter from the outside, this would have been much faster.
After things were drilled and clecoed, I fit the hinge pins (using the stock pins for the fitting) and then cut out an area for the tab on the end of the hinge pin (these are the ones Van’s sells).
