I have been playing around with solid carbon (1/16 inch dia.) pushrods. I have found that you can bend the wire to whatever form you want for the end, and then leave a long straight ( 0.5 inch) section to fit flush against the side of the carbon rod. Then take a piece of shrink tubing and shrink it down over the wire/pushrod section. Once this is done you can slide the wire in and out until the control surface is adjusted. Then wick some thin Cya glue into the shrink tubing and you are done.

I have pulled on one of these as hard as I could without ripping open my thumb and it held, so this is probably all you will ever need for a handlaunch.

I saw a neat alternative to z bends at one of our recent handlaunch contests. The builder had used straight pins bent 90 degrees near the heads instead of z bends. A simple, neat connection. I am going to use this (using #18 brads instead of pins) for a Zagi Razor I am building. One nice thing about using the shrink tubing/ Cya combination is that you can peel off the shrink with a razor blade, grab the wire with a pair of pliers and give it a hard twist to remove it if you need to make repairs.