SAC produces replacement metal landing gear for many aircraft kits in many different scales. The replacement gear can be a big help in larger, heavier kits that may require lots of weight in the nose area to allow them to sit correctly or for gear that is inherently fragile in its design.

This set is for the newer mold Revell of Germany Panavia Tornado kits (GR.1/IDC/ECR), a great kit by itself, with excellent detail and engineering. The SAC gear, for this application, gives the builder a comparable level of excellent detail (see the side-by-side photo of the assembled and painted parts and try to decide which is kit and which is SAC) and one less step in the assembly process of the main gear legs. The one detractor I found in using the SAC main gear legs is that the attachment block/peg was not properly molded on either gear leg, so proper alignment and location would be left to the Mk. 1 eyeball of the builder.

The nose gear is well molded and again has comparable detail to the kit part. The Tornado is tail heavy and does require some nose weight to keep it sitting properly on the “tarmac”. To this end, the SAC gear will give a stouter “leg” to stand on as compared to the plastic kit parts. And, for those of you that are somewhat “clutsy” with your builds, it adds a level of confidence when you’re picking up and putting down your planes for showing in various venues.

I was hoping to find that these replacement landing gear parts would be produced without mold seams, but there is still some clean up required to rid your kit of these lines. I’m not sure if that’s a by-product of the molding process or if it’s a carryover from the masters.

In conclusion, with the SAC gear in place on this kit, I can be more confident of not “tweaking” the landing gear as I place my completed (or soon to be completed, I hope) RoG Tornado on a display/contest table or into the display case.

A big thanks goes out to Scale Aircraft Conversions for supplying the review items and to IPMS USA for allowing me the opportunity to perform the review!