I spent the last couple of days sawing off and cleaning the resin parts, dryfitting cockpit components and trying to decide which parts to use. The CMK control stick handle is a mis-cast blob. I like the beefier CMK stick so I transplanted the kit handle to the CMK stick.
The kit rear machine gun is pretty nice but the resin piece betters it in detail and having a hollow barrel end. There is a PE piece for the gun sight that I have not attached yet.
Same deal with the oblique-firing cannons. These won't be easily seen so the benefit of the added resin detail isn't that tangible.
The barrel ends of the cannons are separate pieces and again the differences are slight. The CMK pieces have the benefit of having the barrel ends already hollowed out.
The bulkhead behind the pilot's seat is well represented either way but the CMK piece has more detail.
The radio equipment faces look like they came from the exact same mold but the CMK frame is beefier and better defined.
I dry-fit the fuselage and wings with the kit cockpit floor (with the spars) and using the main resin cockpit pieces (dry-fitting is hard when there are no positive attachment points between the resin parts).
The big decision is whether or not to use the CMK cockpit floor, which will remove the wing spars from the assembly and make wing attachment a little less sure. Going this route would also require me to remove the fuselage join in the cockpit area, which is also a potential concern. After futzing around with the kit cockpit parts and the resin parts, I've decided to jump in with both feet and go with the CMK resin parts. I think I can still use the wing spar idea but instead of them emanating out from the fuselage, I can cut them from the kit cockpit floor piece, glue them into the wings and stick them into the fuselage.
The resin sidewalls will require removal of the molded fuselage detail. As I showed before, the instructions are fairly vague about what needs to be removed so I will have to just have to double check the fit as I go.
The removals are done slowly, deliberately and one sub-area at a time. I use a combination of a curved x-acto blade, a straight blade and the Tamiya sprue cutters to slice, scrape and cut the detail off. The pilot starboard panel first...
Then the pilot port side panel next...
I move down to the gunner's side panels...
Dry fit checking of multiple resin components is like building a house of cards. At some point, I need to secure some resin in place and so the side panels are glued into place using CA glue. That fuselage join and molded details on the middle section of the cockpit area is removed. Point of no return has been crossed.
I can now do a more accurate check on the fit. I'm especially concerned if the fuselage halves are not completely coming together because that could lead to further problems. Everything checks out... fit looks ok.
With painting in mind, I will now figure out which sub-assemblies can be attached and which should be left off.