Didn’t put in a ton of shop time today, at least partially because I’m annoyed at it still being 90+° in October. You’d think I’d be somewhat used to that after 11 Houton summers, but nope, the way it stays hot so late still bugs me every year…
Anyway, I decided to work on finalizing the cowl pins. I knew I was going to need some sort of bend at the forward ends, but I’d been thinking of a few ideas for a day or so. I did some poking around with other build sites, but didn’t really find any solid information. So today, I found some scrap Romex lying around and found that it was a good size for doing some tinkering with what shape I wanted. I settled pretty quickly on having the pin bend inboard about 30° at the forward most hinge eye, then bending a little eye shape about an inch and a half away. After mocking it with Rolex, next I did a trial bend on some extra pin material I had lying around, just so I could do a trial of actually inserting/removing the pin.
That worked out well, so I moved on to the real pins. Nothing really exciting here, though it did take a bit of trial and error to get the bend just right. I wanted the eye to be clear of the back of the pin cover, but only just barely, so I could still easily grab it with needle nose pliers. Then it took a couple iterations to trim each pin to the proper length and grind a point on the aft end to help it get through the hinge eyes.
The resulting business end:
With the pin fully inserted, it tucks into place nicely:
With that done, I had the opportunity to get a look at the cowl sort of in its final form, with the pin covers installed. At least the gaps look just fine from 10’ away:
Speaking of those pin covers and they gaps…as I sort of anticipated yesterday, the more I look at those gaps, the more they annoy me. In the midst of thinking about that today, I randomly tried adding washers behind the pin covers, and found that having them sit just a bit higher does help aesthetically. So now I’m considering adding a little material to the packing there to make this extra spacing permanent…but then there’s the question of correcting the gaps.
I’m considering opening up the edges a bit, then packing micro back there and installing the covers over it to set better gaps (and, by extension, the nearby cowl contour). The main problem there is that I’d need to find some way to tape the cover edges to establish the gap, like maybe five or six layers of electrical tape. It might work, but it also feels kind of fiddly to me. So I dunno, I’ll still be mulling that over for a bit.