If you try to snap it out without cutting through, you risk the wood splitting. Use the knife to carefully cut through these both front and back until the part falls out of the sheet. If you look carefully, you'll see that there are a few little 'bridges' of plywood holding each part in place for shipping. Step One: Removing the parts from the sheet If it really bothers you, you can wipe the parts with a cotton cloth and warm water with a little washing up liquid. Buildings that were heated by wood and peat fires and splashed by mud from unpaved roads and in an era before washable paint would have been fairly grungy. Most people who've seen our assembled product feel that this adds to the 'atmosphere' of a beat up old village and we strongly agree with them. Laser cut parts also tend to be a little brown/sooty around the edges. If a part is more severely damaged despite our fanatical quality controls - please let us know and we'll arrange for a replacement part for you. These are hidden by other layers of wood when the model is assembled - so you don't need to worry about them.

We also (even more rarely) get small splinters on the backs of the tabs of walls and floors. In extreme cases, you might need to help it out with a box-cutter - but that should be rare. You should be able to gently push these out from the back side of the material with the tip of a ballpoint pen. Wood is a natural material - it's not 100% uniform - so once in a while, a piece that should have been cut out and discarded will become stuck. Note that in the instructions below, you can click on any of the pictures to see them in more detail.

Optionally: A brown 'Sharpie' pen (Walmart again!).

You may want to wipe off any excess blobs with a damp paper towel - especially if you're using a glue that doesn't dry clear. The tight fit of our parts means that you only need a tiny amount of glue to hold the model together.

It dries clear (very handy!) and holds parts together well as it dries so you can work quickly. We use 'Aleene's Tacky Glue' in the gold bottle (you can buy it in the craft department at Walmart and from most craft shops). Please don't try to use superglue, epoxy, hot-melt glue, gorilla glue or anything like that - stick to some kind of wood-working glue, preferably one that dries clear. A sharp modeling knife, a scalpel or (at a pinch) a box-cutter for snicking the parts out of the sheet - we use Xacto knives and keep a supply of new blades handy.

Puritan scaffold drawing