I received my decals from David at Fine Art of Decals, which concludes my shopping for this project unless I pick up a set of canopy masks or botch the canopy and have to order a vac replacement. Decals look very NICE!
I'm starting off this build in the customary place... the cockpit. I need to figure out how the Aires resin cockpit fits. I CAREFULLY cut the resin sidewalls, floor and radio shelf from their casting blocks. The fit of the resin cockpit parts to EACH OTHER is very good for whatever that's worth. The side walls are being held by friction and the radio shelf is attached with a ball of Blu-Tack.
I've also assembled the kit cockpit to serve as a guide on how to best fit the resin cockpit. Parts fit looks to be pretty vague in this nose area but the kit cockpit floor has an edge that lines up with the top of the wheel well to help get the correct placement in the fore/aft orientation.
I dry-fit the kit cockpit into the nose to check fit and orientation, noting the where the radio shelf edge is in relation to the canopy rails on the upper fuselage piece. Fit looks decent but without much in the way of location pins, it's hard to be sure.
The side-by-side comparison of the kit cockpit and resin cockpit highlights a very important difference... the height of the sidewalls. As you can see in the 2nd picture below, the Aires sidewalls are higher than the kit sidewalls.
Plugging the kit cockpit back into the fuselage, I can begin to see the first modification needed to make the resin cockpit fit. I need to remove the overhanging edge of the canopy rails to accommodate the higher sidewalls.
Before the trim...
After the trim...
I substitute the resin cockpit in place to see how things fit. We're getting somewhere now! Although it doesn't look pretty, I've already reduced the fit problem to a single dimension, height. By trimming the floor of the resin cockpit tub and the top of the nose bay, I think the height issue will be resolved.
Playing around with the pieces a little more, I stumbled onto what is probably the key to fit the Aires resin cockpit to the Academy P-38 kit. The fit into the fuselage top half is very good. The notches in the front of the Aires sidewall correspond perfectly to the locating pin position and provides a positive key for placement.
The slight curvature of the sidewall extension is designed to help the coaming piece to fit into place. It looks like the coaming is a little undersized, probably due to shrinkage.
Test fitting the windshield to the coaming verifies the size discrepancy. The clear windshield is noticeably wider than the resin coaming it sits on. Might there be a way to gently "force" the coaming to be wider?