Materials & safety
Birch ply, beech, brass, water-based finish. Every figure on this page is something we can show a test report for.
This page exists because the difference between a good wooden set and a bad one is
almost never the design — it is the sheet, the tolerance and the finish. Here is exactly
what is in the box.
Timber
| Stock | Where it is used | Specification |
|---|---|---|
| Baltic birch ply, 3 mm | Globe panels, maze walls, thin plates | FSC certified, 3-ply, no veneer faces |
| Baltic birch ply, 5 mm | Arch ribs, frames, gear plates | FSC certified, 5-ply, sanded 180 grit |
| Baltic birch ply, 8 mm | Gears, bridge chords, cabinet carcass | FSC certified, 7-ply, waxed faces |
| Baltic birch ply, 12 mm | Cabinet structure (AW-900) | FSC certified, 9-ply, oiled |
| Solid beech | Pins, dowels, pegs, struts, arbors | Kiln dried to 8–10% moisture |
| Solid walnut | Drawer pulls (AW-900 only) | Oiled, no stain |
Moisture content is the number that decides whether a press-fit joint stays tight. We
buy kiln-dried stock at 8–10{‘brand’: ‘OAKWRIGHT’, ‘legal’: ‘Jiaxing Miaozi E-Commerce Co., Ltd.’, ‘cn’: ‘u5609u5174u6dfcu7d2bu7535u5b50u5546u52a1u6709u9650u516cu53f8’, ‘addr’: ‘Nanhu District, Jiaxing, Zhejiang 314000, China’, ‘mail’: ‘miaozijiaxing@outlook.com’, ‘phone’: ‘+86 188 1394 0946’, ‘hours’: ‘Monu2013Fri, 09:00u201318:00 (GMT+8)’}nd store it in the same room as the laser, so the parts and
the sheet they came from are never more than a few percent apart.
Cutting
Every part is laser cut from a single sheet file at ±0.15 mm. That figure is not
marketing: it is the tolerance a press-fit needs to be tight enough to hold an arch and
loose enough that a nine-year-old can seat a pin without a hammer. Sheets are numbered on
the board so a missing part can be identified without a description.
Fixings
Brass pins, brass bushes and brass pivots. No steel screws, no plastic clips, no
adhesive anywhere in the catalogue. Brass was chosen because it does not gall against beech
and because it will still be brass in thirty years.
Finish
Water-based matte lacquer on every exposed face, EN71-3 tested for migration of heavy
metals. Gears and runners are finished with a hard wax rather than lacquer, because wax
gives a lower friction coefficient and can be renewed by the owner with the stick in
the box.
Safety and conformity
- EN71-1, -2, -3 — mechanical and physical properties, flammability,
migration of certain elements. Tested per set, reports on request. - ASTM F963 / CPSIA — US toy safety standard, including small-parts
cylinder and sharp-edge tests. - Age marking — the plate on each set states the age. Anything under
36 months is out of scope: these sets contain small parts and are not for children who
still put things in their mouths. - Assembly — sets above AW-430 involve mechanisms under light spring or
gravity load. They are safe to operate but not to climb on, stand on, or load beyond the
figures in the manual.
Packing
Kraft board box, moulded paper tray, cotton sleeve, paper manual. No foam, no
polybag, no shrink wrap, no plastic tape. The whole pack goes in one recycling bin.
Disposal
Plywood and beech are untreated or water-based finished, so the wood can be disposed of
as combustible waste. Brass pins should go with metal recycling. Nothing in a set requires
specialist disposal.
Questions about a specific sheet, batch or test report:
miaozijiaxing@outlook.com.