Revell's 1/40th scale (or thereabouts) Corporal missile carrier and launch stuff.  I built this model more or less on a dare.  Every now and then I go into these strange modeling phases where I buy as many kits as ever, but I don't actually build anything.  I buy kits, books, magazines, paint, and tools.  I lie in bed and think about building something.  But I never actually do build anything, and meantime the collection of unbuilt kits stored on the upper shelves of my closet grows and grows and grows...

Eventually the collection of kits started to slump.  I'd go in the closet to get fresh clothes for work, and the disturbance would cause a kit avalanche.  At one point I conceived the idea of building MiG-21MFs in every scale from 1/144 to 1/32nd, and one day all my MiG-21s rained down.  Another time the Renwal Atomic Cannon slid off the top of the pile, and it's a sufficiently husky kit it actually hurt when it landed on my foot.

I decided after that the next kit to slide off would be built, come Hell or high water.  And it just so happened that it was this kit, the Revell Corporal and launcher, that slid off.

The kit comes with the Corporal missile, the weird four-wheel-steering carrier, a launch table a la the V-2, and a selection of crewmen, including this guy, who appears to be gesticulating in disgust because the launch controller isn't working right.  The only significant molding flaw I found in the kit was massive sinkage on the figures; practically every one of them had hollow backs.

It's actually a pleasant kit to build.  It isn't going to stagger those used to modern Dragon kits with its detail or engineering, but it was actually a lot more fun than I thought it would be.  There were some tense moments getting the elevating missile cradle to mate with the chassis, because you have to get a set of gears to mesh, and the ladders on the missile cradle were somewhat troublesome.  But on the whole, it was surprisingly easy and fun to build.

I'm sort of used to the idea of the decals in old kits being horrid, but these were quite nice - thin and crisp and amenable to Micro-Sol.  The US Army stuff on the cab settled down over the access hatches quite nicely, and the Corporal itself comes with a reasonable quantity of stenciling.

I experimented with the paint.  I often use spray cans to paint monochromatic kits, especially armor models.  But most of the olive drab spray paints I've used seem very dark to me (or maybe it's just my eyesight going south; that's also possible).  So for this kit, I used a vaguely olive-drabbish color from Krylon called "Oregano".  It's a little lighter than I expected, and more like khaki than olive drab, but overall, I'm not displeased with it.  Or at least not displeased enough to repaint the whole thing.

Not bad for a dare, and now that I've actually finished something, I'm starting to have more ideas.  Why, even now, I already have two more kits in work - the old Lindberg "Yuri Gagarin" spaceship (the one with the opening hangar bay on the top) and the Moebius "Iron Man" version of Black Widow.

And there are always those MiG-21s, lurking, lurking, ever lurking...