Dave...what you are seeing is the horizontal stab half...sorry about the fuzzy pics...my digital is a rather cheap on and does not do good in close up shots. The Tyvek was ripped off both sides of the hinge inner piece. The remaining Tyvek is stuck in the elevator half..there were some hinges still in the stab halves but some were pulled out just like the elevator halves themselves.
I did talk to GP and while they were sorry it happened they say I am the first person in 4 years that they have been selling the hinges to have a problem.
I had some of the 2"x9" hinge stock that came from the same package as the hinges I used in the plane so I did some testing using my fingernail and I was just barely able to remove any of the Tyvek until I wicked some thin CA on a 3/4x3/4 " piece and it was pretty easy to scratch the Tyvec off....dry non CA'd Tyvec was very hard to to scrape off. I wish I had some answers if only to make me feel a little better about the failure...and that is really what this was..a failed CA hinge.
I am pretty tough skinned after 30 years of flying and have another of my designs being plotted and will start cutting wood tonight but to loose one of my own scratch built designs in only 2 flights set me back...but only for a little while. Who knows...this may never happen again to anyone but I wanted to make people aware so they could make thier own judgements about any future CA hinging they might be thinking about.
Sorry for the fuzzy pics but my Kodac 2.2 mpix is only good to about 8" close ups. I guess you just have to see the hinges in person to get the full drift of what happened...hell I am as confused as anyone right now but I will be using different hinges for a while and maybe leave the CA hinges dor different projects in the future.
The only thing I might have done wrong was..dang..I can't think of anything I did wrong...oh well live and learn but I appreciate all the concerned responces...
I just got an e-mail from GP...here it is...a canned reply but a reply non the less[:-]
Dear Valued Customer:
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Thank you for your input. We have forwarded your email to the Great
Planes product management team to look into this.
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