The AWI Review unboxes the new M8A3 Tesla Scout car from Konflikt ’47!
When Konflikt 47 and Osprey Publishing released the supplement Resurgence a little over half a year ago, I was really mainly excited about a handful of units in that book (not having much interest in the Japanese at the time–mainly because I couldn’t afford another army). One of the units I really, really wanted was the M8 Greyhound tesla variant–the M8A3 Scout Car.
You see, on the of the armies I run for Konflikt 47 is a US Mechanized Cavalry force. Frankly, the Coyote wasn’t cutting it and the Greyhound–while accurate for US Mechanized platoons in WW2 lacked the firepower to do any real damage. So when I saw that there would be a tesla variant of this much-loved US scout vehicle, yeah I couldn’t wait.
So after months of being forced to do the thing I didn’t want to do (waiting), I was happy to throw money at Warlord so I could get my hands on this. And it did not disappoint.
One of the cleanest resin casts I have received from Warlord to date.
In the box there is a standard Italeri M8 Greyhound plastic kit–of which I have assembled three already so I knew what to expect from it–and one bubble-bagged resin piece with a metal hatch attached.
Let’s talk about the resin pieces. Warlord must have seriously upped their resin game, because this is the cleanest resin piece I have ever had from them. I have about five or six Sherman-T’s and nearly all the resin turrets have some terrible mold-line issues. in THIS kit, however, there are no mold line issues to speak of and the resin looks clean. Like off-white clean.
I see what you did here, Warlord. I see the crispness of this mold. Great work.
The sculpt of the turret is also spot-on for what you would expect for a Greyhound. It is similar in size (it is a little shorter) to the original ballistic one; and the size of the barrel is not overwhelming or out-of-place looking. It feels like it belongs.
Now on to the less-fun part. Many of my viewers/readers know that I am not a fan of the Italeri plastic kits in this scale. There are a lot of reasons why. Primarily I just think they try to hard (and fail) to be a diorama-level kit. They use a cheaper plastic that is difficult to work with and it is fragile–and Italeri insists on including a ton of tiny fiddly bits on poorly-defined greenish sprues that break easily. It’s a royal pain.
I know Warlord has a great partnership with Italeri; this kit is one of their better ones. Everything went together OK (I use Tamiya super-thin plastic cement, FYI) and I only lost one tiny piece to the dreaded carpeting when it slipped out of my fingers.
I absolutely love the final product here. Can’t stress enough how lovely that turret looks in real life.
Now on to Phase 2… detailing this bad boy up!
I love adding stowage to my kits. It is a hobby. A hobby within a hobby. A metahobby, if you will. So I went to work googling images of M8 Greyhounds to see how they normally handed stowage issues. And of course, the crew just threw their stuff everywhere.
So here is the start of the stowage I have added. I plan to add sandbags, additional bits here and there like helmets and some small arms, etc…
Keep in mind, I have zero skills with Greenstuff and this is basically the best I can do at my current ability. But! It’s a thing. I’m still happy with it so far.
Check out the original article here!
Also look his unboxing video of the M8A3 Scout as well!
Scout Ahead!
Beat the monsters back!
Dan Hewitson
Tom Mecredy
Aaron Trueman