The Aircraft

The DC-8 was Douglas’ version of the Boeing 707. I reviewed Minicraft’s DC-8-73 back in 2014. You can read the review of the kit here https://ipmsusa.org/reviews/Kits/Aircraft/minicraft_144_dc8/minicraft_144_dc8.htm

Unfortunately, sitting on the shelf for 5 years has taken its toll on this model. It’s still quite good looking, and when Phil Peterson, who manages the sending of review items, said there was a landing gear set available, I took it. When I picked up the model from the shelf to see how tough it would be to remove the original gear, one of the main gear legs fell off. OK, SAC to the rescue.

There are also kits of the DC-8 61 and -71. These are pretty much the same kit, with a different fuselage. Minicraft also released their DC-8 63 and -73 as a bagged kit with no decals. The big advantage to this kit is that it has the engines for either the -63 or-73, which the original kits didn’t have.

The Scale Aircraft Conversions set.

The SAC set for the DC-8 consists of 16 parts, all in white metal. There are a lot of parts because you can do TWO DC-8s with one of these sets. There are four main gear legs, with the support parts which use the kit wheels, and a nose gear leg and retractor. These parts closely match the kit parts.

Painting

Since the original kit parts were painted silver, there was no painting to do. The metal SAC parts looked great.

Assembly

Since this was a repair, I had to remove the wheels from the original gear legs. I just twisted each wheel until it disconnected from the plastic part. This left part of the original mounting pin inside the wheel. It took me about 10 minutes with a drill in a pin vise to redrill the holes in the wheel hubs. A drop of gel-type CA put the wheels on the SAC parts. There was also a gear door mounted on the landing gear. Again, no problem.

Remounting the gear was slightly more difficult and time consuming than the wheels. Because the Minicraft instructions were long gone, I used the kit parts as an example. The SAC parts went together nicely, and the main gear mounted on the second try for the first one, first try for the second. Experience counts.

The nose gear has a part which I didn’t use in the original build, and it would be hard to mount. So I left it off again.

Overall Evaluation

Highly Recommended. The metal parts are more robust than the plastic ones, and they fit quite nicely. It was too bad that the original gear leg came off, but it happens. And sometimes the plastic parts break. Not a worry with SAC metal gear.

Thanks to Scale Aircraft Conversions for providing the aftermarket parts and IPMS/USA for giving me a chance to use them on a past project.