It seems that many builders end up re-doing their trim tabs while working on the elevators. I had a few stumbles with the trim tab, but not for the reasons many others do. For me, a couple of bone head mental mistakes cost me about $20 in replacement parts. Not too bad. The first mistake was the piano hinge that attaches to the trim tab. I'm still not sure how, but I somehow manged to mis-measure which resulted in the length of hinge being one hinge too short. The second mistake (which ended up really not being too much of a mistake), was that a few of the holes that were countersunk in the trim tab spar had a slight knife edge and were ever so slightly oversized. I jumped the gun and quickly reordered a new spar from Van's since it takes nearly a week and a half to get anything from them. As it turns out it is commonplace when countersinking such thin material to have an occasional knife edge. In this application the spar is sandwiched between the hinge and skin, so the added support of the hinge really negates any worries of a few knife edges. Any how, I decided to wait and use the new spar since it was already in transit.
Luckily, I was able to source replacement hinge material from my local airport. It was stored coiled up and had a few minor kinks, but I was able to work them out easily and make the replacement piece.