aikijay,

the purpose of the top section that was glued back on is to give you a form to guide your stripping above the cockpit/recess cut-out line which will help ensure that the strips coming up to the cockpit cut-out/recess line are fair/on pattern.

if you do not have this form section in place, it is more difficult to get the last couple deck strips in this area to lie correctly becuase they may have no support.

once you have built up the deck high enough that your cockpit/recess pattern has strips under all its edges, you can remove the top of the form, cut out your cockpit/recess and start your cockpit/recess work.

i have built from a kit in the past where they did not include these top sections....and i can confirm that stripping in that area was more difficult than it needed to be. it would have been a lot easier had the left those top sections available for temporary support. this is an area, that on many designs, has a lot of bending and twisting of strips going on so the support the temporary sections of the forms provides is useful to get the shape you will be shooting for.

without those top sections i ended up using a lot of reinforced tape to bend the last couple strips into the shape that a temporary part of the form would have provided.

i hope that helps