Contax IIa black / Contax IIIa color swap

Just came into a lot of contax bodies, not planning to keep them all, and wondering if i can eek out my dream machine.

Still waiting on the mail, so not totally sure, but i think i have a black dial IIa and two color dial IIIa bodies on their way. I’ve read (and believe) that converting black dials to be internally flash sync’d is nontrivial and don’t want to bother trying. What I’m wondering is whether or not it’s possible that i could swap the top plate (and meter movement) from one of the IIIa bodies over to the IIa body and use the IIa top plate to make myself a franken-color dial IIa.

I suspect i won’t really know till I open them up and try (I’ll probably be opening them for CLA anyways) and really not even sure that I’d actually prefer the meterless body, but just wondering if anyone has attempted something like this or has enough experience under the hood of a post-war Contax to say for sure if it’ll work or not.

Update!

Got the contaxes on the slab and have them opened up for CLA. So far, it looks like the swap is possible.

On the left is is black dial iia with mechanical sync (requiring an adapter to use flash), on the right is a fully synchronized color dial iiia (with the meter removed). It seems like both bodies use the same shutter chassis. The iia top plate fits fine on the iiia at it appears that the threaded holes necessary to attach the meter and iiia top plate are present in the iia.

The main difference afaict is the different rewind shaft which hopefully i can just remove and swap between the bodies.

I have to sell off one of the bodies so being able to move the meter back to the iia body is critical for my operation.