Thanks for the responses. I guess I'm not the only one with brittle parts. It appears that GP has a batch of kits with bad plastic (nylon?). When I bend the tree that the z-bends came off of, I can nearly fold it over without breaking. When I bend the tree that the hinge clips came from, it snaps before hitting 90 deg! Anyone with a new kit might want to try this before starting to build in order to check for a potential problem.

It sounds like GP is replacing my kit - which is great since digging all of the hinge clips out of the control surfaces would have made for an ugly build. Now I'll have some spare parts for future crash repairs. I'm still out a bottle of CA a few hours of build time, though.

BTW - I searched around under my workbench and found the tiny bag with the two extra hinge retainer rings. It must have fallen out when I unpacked the box. Since the parts listing only mentioned 10, I didn't have a reason to look for 12 (until I read this thread ).