Cockpit
Luckily the Black Box replacements that are designed for the Hasegawa kit look like the will fit nicely (what did I say about building this kit out of box ???? )
As anticipated, the BB side walls did fit. Of course, it did require some trimming and thinning of the kit side walls, but that is common practise for resin sets, even when applying them to the kit they are designed for.
Here we see one of the sidewalls with the kit tub in place. Again some trimming was needed to get everything to co-habit nicely.
Moving onto the wheel wells
I was quite surprised to see so many ejection pin marks in the main wheel well. These are very nasty to remove and Tamiya would have been better to put the ejection pins on the other side (i.e. the intake trunking). These would have been much easier to clean up.
As a carry-over from the 1:32 Tamiya F-16, they have engineered this kit to also have quick remove pylons (good idea) and vertical tail (not sure why you would want to do that in 1:48). Here we see the inner workings of the vertical tail base. The two “poly caps” which are used to mate with stainless steel pins on the fuselage top can be seen held in place via a special jig.