Micron Art 1889 Four-Passenger Sleigh

The Z scale sleigh kit is a sheet of "photo etched brass" about 1-3/8 inches square (smaller than it probably is on your screen).

To construct the kit I used an X-Acto knife to cut the pieces apart, tweezers (both squeeze to open and squeeze to close), Xuron Smooth Jaws Tweezernose Pliers, a small paint brush, and a magnifier head set.

Because the horse to pull the sleigh, the sleigh driver, and the passengers were essentially two-dimensional sheets of brass, I chose a draft horse that came with some figures purchased on eBay and some setting Preiser people to use instead.

I used HobbyTown USA Maxi-Cure extra thick cyanoacrylate glue to hold things together.

Working with these tiny pieces was no easy task for a klutz like me.  You need a steady hand and good eyes.  The magnifier head set was a big help.

The horse and people were already painted.  The sleigh was unpainted brass.  I used acrylic paints on the floor, seats and other hardware, leaving the sides of the sleigh the natural golden brass color.  I don't know if I did not let the acrylic paints dry long enough or if I needed to use some sort of metal primer first, but I found that handling the painted brass

pieces with tweezers tended to remove paint and I had to do a lot of retouching.

I used a piece of black thread from my wife's sewing drawer instead of the wire that came with the kit for the reins.

The finished horse and sleigh are about 1-1/8 inches long. The pictures to the right were made with my Hewlett Packard PrecisionScan Pro Scanner. I couldn't get a good, sharp image with my camera.