I had the bottom hinge break this summer while on a 4+ month trip. Googled the issue and found pages and pages on this issue. It's not just the extra weight of a wood door panel but the door, with its shelves is supposedly designed to take a quart of milk, some cans of soda, ketchup and the other such items often placed in a fridge door. The weight of the door etc leverage a lot of pressure on the lower hinge when the door is opened. For Norcold to have designed that hinge out of plastic is quite unbelievable. Googling this issue reveals that this problem has been known to Norcold for quite some years and yet they did nothing to fix the original design except to manufacture and sell a metal bracket for a fix (or sell you a brand new door which was also poorly designed and destined to break). Shame on them!
Anyway, the brackets as pictured by the OP are very easy to install - took less than 5 minutes. They are designed to snap into a slot that exists in the door frame. I only installed the bottom bracket on the fridge door in that it doesn't appear to me that the top hinge absorbs the same pressures.
As a further comment on Norcold and its customer service business model, or lack thereof, I found it interesting that on the Norcold website I could find no fix or part solving this pervasive problem. So I nervously bought from a generic internet source - one that didn't even have a picture of the part - hoping it would fit the fridge and work. I was very surprised when I received it that this metal hinge fix part was in fact manufactured by Norcold. Guess if they hide the fact on their web site that they have a part to fix THEIR design problem, then they don't have to furnish the part gratis or at a lower cost to THEIR customers. At the price that is charged for this minor stamped part, someone is making a fortune off this design flaw. IMO, an upstanding company would address this problem in their FAQ and offer to send the 'fix' themselves.
