[Kevin WS]

The next stage is to start on the base.

Picture 1 – The ground floor piece and the three sets of stairs that go up to it, cut out and pre-scored.

I mentioned most of the model is really made up of small blocks and cubes.

To assist with the assembly of architectural models, and square or rectangular shapes, I use two key items – plate glass offcuts and an engineer’s square.

Plate glass offcuts are easy to get – work out the sizes you want (smaller is better than larger) and then go to a glass shop. I have always found them happy to help, and have always been given the offcuts free after they have trimmed the pieces to size and smoothed the edges!

The glass makes great little bases to build on, and obviously, they ensure a 100% flat surface. When squaring pieces up, glue does ooze out and this is easy to clean off, especially when it has dried.

When one side of a piece of glass gets gluey, I just flip it over!

Engineers squares – the very small ones – are NOT easy to get though. For some reason nowadays they do not seem to be widely used and are even difficult to find on the Internet. But keep searching as these are great for squaring up models.

When making a box shape, I usually apply glue to ALL the tabs (I use white PVA woodworkers glue) and then put the shape together.

At this stage, it then goes onto the glass and I work around it a few times with the engineers square, flipping the piece as I go, so all edges get squared. As the glue sets everything ends up perfectly square.

Picture 2 – This shows the finished floor piece on one of my plate glass squares.

Picture 3 – This shows the same piece, along with how I use the engineers square to square everything up as the glue slowly sets.

Picture 4 – A nice tight part with square edges is the result.

Picture 5 – The technique works really on small pieces. The three sets of stairs made up.