When I received the aftermarket SAC landing gear for the 1/72 Academy P38 Lightning I went to get out the kit I had and realized the one I had was 1/48 scale, so I had to quick get one off ebay to do the review. Once I found one at a reasonable price and received the kit I finally got down to business. I opened the kit and got the SAC gear out for comparison. After removing the gear from the kit sprues I laid them out to compare them side by side. I was kind of disappointed with the look of the SAC gear, they had some flash on the gear and some mold lines that were very noticeable. Then I looked over the kit gear and found that Academy has some very good gear right out of the box, the mold lines and crisp detail were almost better than the SAC gear. I then proceeded to clean up each set of gear, the kit gear was a snap cleaning up nicely, the SAC gear was a little more involved, trying to clean up the gear was a challenge because the metal gear is a little on the soft side and bends easily and you are constantly straightening each piece after you work on it, especially the thin pieces. SAC would be great if they made the gear a little stiffer so it would not bend as easily.

In the end I think I would rather use the kit landing gear than the aftermarket ones. I believe in 1/72 scale the gear is too small to really make it worth your while to buy the aftermarket SAC gear, and that could change depending on the kit, but that’s just my opinion.

Thanks to Scale Aircraft Conversions for the review item and IPMS for the review

PROs: Metal Gear

CONs: Metal Gear too soft, detail and finish not the best