Nice. What did you use for nose weights?
For paint, its very expensive, but its hard to beat Tamiya Spray lacquer for color saturation. If you are using white glassine body tube, it covers well in a single coat.
The WAC Corporal was my first too. Got it in 1974 or 1975. Probably because it was the lowest-priced kit among the meagre stock in the hobby section of Two Guys department store.
I have what is almost certainly a confabulated memory of it hanging with a few other bagged kits below a shelved Firing Line ready-to-fly X-15 launch set. I didn't paint it, and I am pretty sure that I lost it up a tree on its second or fifth flight -- because I remember using the leftover B6-4 engine (in the diamond tube package) as an argument for buying another kit.
When my daughter got interested in rockets summer-before-last, I googled my way to Balsa Machining Service looking for a Gyroc. Along with that kit, I ordered a BNC20R cone and some BT20 stock. We salvaged balsa sheet stock from a Guillow's glider that somebody stepped on, used a boxed-milk straw for a lug, and cut a parachute from a plastic shopping bag.
Because I didn't have anything to substitute for two lead NCW-1 nose weights, and no idea how much they massed, I drilled out the cone and glued in a tungsten fishing weight. Made the little rocket way over-stable. We brushed on silver and ball Testors enamel.
When we debuted it at our second club launch, the LCO recognized it and announced to the crowd "This is a classic Estes kit from the 1960s. A scale model of real sounding rocket!" None of the kids waiting in line with their Crayons and Skywriters and Hi Fliers there were impressed, but there were a few murmurs of appreciation among the parents. ^-^. We got five or six good flights out of that rocket over the summer -- from A8-5 to C6-5 -- but the too-big parachute kept getting hung up in the body tube. A lawn-dart bent the tip of the nosecone. A couple of hard landings -- after I switched out the parachute for a streamer -- chewed up the fins. Finally, the forward part of the body tube got crushed when somebody dropped something heavy into our box of rockets at the last launch of the season. I've repaired it, and will repaint it, but it is retired from flying now.
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I've since built BT55, 2 inch (kit bashed from an Estes Mammoth), and BT80 WAC Corporals of varying degrees of fidelity to scale. I've got parts for a 3 inch and another BT20 model bagged and waiting in the build pile.