by a fellow maker, for fellow makers
These are the rules I work by — what I promise, what I accept as natural, and how I deal with the small surprises that come with wood as a material. If you've ordered from Hobbymill before, none of this will surprise you. If you're new, this tells you what to expect.
Every piece of wood that leaves the workshop:
| Product | Thickness | Width | Length |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sheets for modelling | ±0.10 mm | −5 / +20 mm | ±20 mm |
| Planking sheets | ±0.10 mm | −5 / +20 mm | ±20 mm |
| Strips for planking | ±0.10 mm | ±0.10 mm | ±20 mm |
| Square strips | ±0.20 mm | ±0.20 mm | ±20 mm |
| Laserable sheets | ±0.20 mm | ±3 mm | ±3 mm |
| Knife blanks (40×30×140) | ±2 mm | ±2 mm | −0 / +10 mm |
| Pen blanks (19×19×130) | −0 / +2 mm | −0 / +2 mm | −1 / +5 mm |
| Coloured hornbeam (40×40×400) | ±2 mm | ±2 mm | −5 / +10 mm |
| Unique blanks | — | — | — |
Unique blanks are sold piece-by-piece, photographed and numbered — exact dimensions are shown in each listing.
Sanded to 120 grit on the visible surfaces, with crisp edges. Ready for your own finish-sanding to whatever grit your project calls for.
Sanded to 120 grit, ready for CO₂ laser cutting and engraving.
Precision-sawn on a Byrnes table saw — not sanded. The sawn surface is clean and consistent, but you may see very fine saw marks on one side under close inspection. A light pass with sandpaper before paint or finish removes them.
Our sheets are milled to consistent thickness across the whole piece, but the two long edges may not always be perfectly parallel to each other. The variation is small, but it's there. For most modellers this doesn't matter — you'll be ripping strips or cutting parts to your own dimensions anyway. If you need perfectly parallel edges for a particular project, order Custom Milled where each piece is cut to your exact specifications.
Wood is a living material. The following are normal and not considered defects:
Swiss pear ranges from soft pink-cream to a deeper rose. Castello boxwood ranges from pale cream to a warmer yellow-cream. Black hornbeam ranges from deep black to occasional brownish streaks. Alaskan yellow cedar is the most uniform but can show subtle warm tones.
Swiss pear in particular naturally develops small, tight, light-coloured pin knots — these are part of the wood's character, not defects. They are firm, do not affect structure, and many modellers consider them attractive. Dead knots, black knots, and loose knots are never shipped.
Two sheets are never identical.
All wood slowly deepens or lightens with exposure to light. Swiss pear in particular darkens beautifully over the first year.
Some woods are more sensitive to humidity than others. Alaskan yellow cedar in particular is known to move (cup or bow slightly) when it meets a new climate.
Sheets at 0.6–1 mm thickness are inherently sensitive to humidity changes and may show slight cupping or bowing after travelling between climates. This is easily corrected — see Handling your delivery below.
Wood that has been carefully kiln-dried in Estonia will need a short adjustment when it arrives at your workshop, especially if the climate is significantly different from ours.
Let the sealed package rest in the room where you'll work with the wood for at least 24 hours. This step matters most for thin sheets (0.6–1 mm) and for Alaskan yellow cedar.
Lay them flat on a smooth surface, place a flat board or two on top, and leave them overnight at room temperature.
Store unused wood flat, supported along its length, and away from direct sunlight or heat sources.
When timber arrives at the workshop, a meaningful portion gets set aside.
Not because it's bad wood. For general woodworking — furniture, turning, even most hobby projects — it would be perfectly fine. But for ship modelling, where every plank on a hull is seen, where the smallest colour shift breaks the illusion of a single piece of timber, "perfectly fine" isn't the same as right.
What we ship is the portion that's actually right for the job.
When you order multiple stock sheets, we do our best to pull pieces from the same batch, but we cannot guarantee zero colour variation across pieces — especially across different thicknesses, which are milled from different parts of the timber.
All strips within a single pack are colour-matched. No visible colour variation within the pack.
Every piece in a custom order is cut from the same single piece of timber. Colour variation between pieces is essentially zero — they look like they belong together because they did, until they were milled. This is what serious modellers come to Hobbymill for.
Wood is a natural material, and even with the most careful inspection, a piece can have a defect that only shows once it's milled — a dark patch that runs deeper than expected, a colour shift on one edge, a tolerance error from a saw cut that didn't quite go right. We know what these materials are used for, and we know that running short of one piece can stall a build for weeks while replacement wood travels across continents.
So when it makes sense, we add a little to your order — enough that you can finish the project even if a piece doesn't work out.
This isn't a fixed policy. Sometimes the wood is uniformly perfect and we ship exactly what you ordered. Sometimes a particular batch needs an extra strip or sheet to be safe. The principle is simple: you ordered material to complete a build, not to count pieces.
If a piece arrives with damage, missing pieces, defects beyond what's described here, or simply isn't right for your project — send a photo within 14 days and we'll make it right.