Behold the mechanism of your undoing: a working miniature excavator, executed in plywood. To be fair, the rules of the game have changed lately. Time was when a nipper would ask for the impossible ...

Set the blade so it goes one-quarter inch through the bottom of the plywood. This will give you a nice, crisp cut. A full sheet of plywood is 4’x8’ and can get difficult to support.

For this project, we used a single 4 x 8-ft. sheet of 1/2-in.-thick red oak plywood covered with wood veneer. It can be tough ...