This set is designed to provide replacement parts for Trumpeter’s Tu-22 Blinder kit. As with most of SAC’s landing gear sets, the metal parts are intended to be one-for-one replacements for the kit parts.

The set includes replacement parts for the nose gear and both main gear strut assemblies and some of the associated actuators. However, it appears that a couple of parts are missing as the nose strut has two small parts to be fitted to the sides of the strut (parts E1 and E2) that are identical, but there is only one of them provided in the SAC set. In addition, the kit includes a small secondary retraction arm (part E3) which attaches to the triangular retraction arm, but this actuator is not included in the SAC set. As noted in the photos, my nose strut was slightly bent to one side when I opened the package, however, being white metal, it was easily straightened. It also appears that my set has an extra triangular casting in it that does not match any of the parts in the kit, but it took me some time to figure this out by comparing the part to all the kit parts.

For the main gear, the set includes both the main strut and the actuator that is attached to each strut. Unfortunately, as shown in the photos, on my set the retraction arm and the small bracing strut on each main strut were bent and would need to be straightened before being painted. A bigger issue, however, is that the Blinder has four wheels for each main gear, two on each side, but both main gear legs in the set have axles only on one side when there should be axles on both sides!

I have used SAC gear in quite a few builds and as the Blinder is a pretty bit kit, I was looking forward to counting on this set to help support the weight of a large aircraft, unfortunately as the main gear struts only have axles on one side, I will be using the kit parts instead of the ones in this set.

Thank you to Scale Aircraft Conversions for the review set and to IPMS-USA for letting me review it. Hopefully, SAC has discovered the error of the missing axles on the main struts and recast the main struts correctly.