Removing various effects

[natepc]

After not playing the game for about 5 years, I was recently struck with the desire to do so. After dusting off the disc and installing it, I remembered the many skins and meshes available, which led me here. Hi. I have never edited a mesh, and only made one attempt at skinning years ago. My question is this:

I downloaded the female_basic_wings mesh, but I am not a fan of the metallic coat or the bits over the eyes and mouth. How would I get rid of them? With my limited knowledge, I have done the following:
All of these are done from a copy of the file, I used a fresh copy each time.
1. Deleting all of the .tga files except the basic body and wing skins. From what I could tell, that did absolutely nothing.
2. Blacking out all the files, the lightmap, glow, etc, except the basic wing and body. I also added the base skins for female_basic. From here, everything looked fine, except the eyes and mouth were still covered. This time, in flesh.
3. Doing some research and installing NifSkope, opened up the .nif and deleted all the unwanted (lightmap, glow, etc) from that. Same result as 2.

What do I need to do to allow the eyes on the skin to show through?

edit: Of course, if this type of question has been asked recently, a point in the right direction would be just as appreciated.

Thanks in advance, and probably  many times after,
Nate C