Work continues and it bears repeating that this kit falls together quite easily.

The tail has 4 tailfins. I left the middle 2 unattached. It'll make it easier to paint. The kit provides the option for the flaps to be placed in the down position. I had to check online photos for the exact placement of the flaps though since the instruction sheet is quite vague on this matter. These are also left unattached to ease painting.

Next comes what differentiates the E-2C 2000 from the standard E-2C, 8-bladed props! Attachment to the engine housing are via polycaps so they can spin freely.

The radar dish also attachs via polycap which allows it to spin freely. Best of all, it becomes another subassembly to be finished separately. I also kept the radar dish mount as a separate subassembly.

And I'm pretty much done. What's left are the tiny antennaes all over the plane which will only be attached in the finishing stage. Time to take out the putty! Luckily, it seems there's only a few spots that need fixing.

So I got this kit and I couldn't resist starting on it. For one thing, it's one of Hasegawa's newest kit. For another, it's such a pretty aircraft. Anyway, I plan this to be a pure OOB build. No need to AMS if I don't know much about the real airplane besides how pretty it looks heh.

First up is the cockpit as usual. The details are actually quite sparse but given that the windows on the cockpit will be very small, this isn't a problem at all. Still though, I couldn't resist giving the seats some more of details. No research done on these. I just cut out thin strips of masking tape to simulate the straps. Hasegawa provided decals for the instrument panels but I decided to handpaint black and drybrush some light gray to pop the details.

Then it's time to assemble the fuselage. Hasegawa recommends 40g of weights on the nose so I put in about 5 steel screw nuts. They are secured in place by a glob of blutack. I really hope it's enough. But I won't know until final assembly. Brrr...

Since this is a first run kit, there's no flash to be seen anywhere and to Hasegawa's credit, even ejection marks are kept to a minimum. Fit is also quite good overall.

One minor complain is on the bottom. The large fairing's fitting could be better although it's nothing serious. There's an obvious step and gap but quite fixable.

The cockpit windows are molded as one big clear part which requires some very intricate masking. Usually I'd stick this to the fuselage with white glue but in this case, cement would work fine as most of the clear parts are actually part of the fuselage. There is also an overhead console which I did a quick detailing by washing some black on the surfaces. Done quite haphazardly because well... it (again) won't be seen once everything is painted.

The nose is also one big clear part. Except for a small window near the tip, everything is fuselage color so I ended up cementing this part too. Within the nose is a sensor box that I painted white and quickly washed with some diluted black.

The size of the wing necessitates that I use clips to help secure the parts together during construction. There are still many parts to be assembled but I couldn't resist snapping the wing onto the fuselage to get an idea how big this kit will be. Wingspan-wise, it's even longer than a 1/48 scale F-16!

I must commend Hasegawa's engineering for the wing as it snaps into the fuselage quite strongly. This means I can keep the parts separate to ease painting and only put them together in the final assembly stages. Depending on the situation, I might not even need to cement the two parts together, the fit being that good.