John, I'm going to accept your offer for an RMA. The Order # was yhst-17210252890263-36264 as received from NitroPlanes.
opjose, and others, have been very useful with respect to advice/suggestions on this plane. In fairness to trying everything offered up to help, I tried the final thing I could think of to obtain CG. I offer this up as information only.
I installed dead weight into the battery tray area to obtain CG. Nothing was placed past the first former located behind the firewall nor was anything placed ahead of the firewall. All electronics were in place. The end result was 1lb.~1.1 oz of dead weight to obtain CG @ 50mm mfg specs. I can imagine some people think I'm nuts on this issue so I took some pics.
I tried uploading the images here but the server won't connect. So I uploaded them to
http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/member.php?u=177795
Dan