Welcome to the world of kit building. You came up with a good solution to get your fuselage straightened out.

I've had to deal with situations like this before - stuff like fuselage sides of different hardness of balsa or sides that don't pull together evenly and want to build in a warp. Each kit seems to require its own approach to fix. At least todays kits and instructions are generally of a higher quality that they used to be 35+ years ago when I started building.

Hogflyer