H is for How Much Can You Stuff in a Egg?

The last of the 'Micro' or mini-stuff for now I think, and not a particularly full sample, but fun nevertheless! Kinder have from time to time produced sets of items so small you wonder how they got under the safety radar, but then a lot of their toys include equally small components, so I guess it's all covered by the H&S caveat on the packaging!

A few of my smallest Kinders, the safari (green) is complete I think, the explorer being around 10mm, and I assume the coach must have come with something else? The pale blue bloke with binoculars is a lighthouse keeper, but I discarded the lighthouse at the time (late 1980/early 1990's), the pair are from a fuel set - see below.

That Wil West stage-coach from both sides, about the same size as the teeny capsule/Christmas cracker ones, but with ridgid moulded-in wheels . . . and giant horses!

These came out in the mid-2000's I think, and the animals are a quite good HO/OO-compatible size, being a small pony and a cow with ball-tipped 'safety-horns'! Although they are not quite in scale with the trailers, but that's more about the thickness of their bases!

I'm not sure if this is a parallel line to the previous ones (came-in about the same time), or a rival, the code-letters on the wings suggest it might be Czapp, another chocolate prize-egg issuer from . . . the former Yugoslavia? It's all in the archive and will be correct when it goes on the A-Z Blogs - a job which is still probably a year away?!

No figure/s in this one either, but plenty going-on at the local aerodrome and a couple of mini-trees to add to the jungle. A common trope with these is the stiff foldable sheet of polyethylene or nylon, which slots together and gets covered in stickers to reveal the building's role, really they'd need a bit of carefully applied heat to look good, but tend to end up looking like inflatable's!

Another common trope has been natives, of a sort of generic 'South Seas' type, and I've picked-up a few over the years, the cartoony one bottom-right was part of a set of four I think; each having a more outrageous finial to the hut's roof!

The two-part green canoe near my finger actually goes with the Disney plug-together figures.

Is he a native, a pirate or a Robinson Crusoe type? But the hootch would paint-up nicely for a WWII Japanese-held island or something in Vietnam, while the boat makes for good background scenery. It all goes in one egg!

While I will have to re-shoot this one next time I visit the 'brown water' navy! Hootch is a bit small and impressionist, but could be used as a food store in the same scenarios mentioned above, or one of those horrid POW cages from Vietnam? A few of the boatman would go well fussing-around Atlantic's Nile vessels too!

These were sent in by someone a few years ago, and while I assume they were evilBay, if they are on your site let me know and I'll take them down. I've actually tweaked the light to improve them a tad, and they are here to show the wider range of these micro-sets, and also that you get reverse colour-ways of each so the tool moulds them all in one colour and then they are split, probably automatically by a/the runner-guillotine?

I have the Arab somewhere (been on the blog I think, or the Airfix Blog?), and guess the coach went with another Wild West set? You can also see the reverse of my fuel pair in grey. These micro-toys (and there have been others) can provide useful stuff for 20mm, 15mm or 10mm war gaming, while some of the vehicles will happily slide into 1:300 micro-armour games with a bit of paint.