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Although my Laser is much stronger, 40 Watt, I still have problems with some material. Plywood is one of the worst. Cheap plywood has a lot of cheap glue and most of the home lasers will not cut it. It took me over 3 years to find a supplier of high quality plywood. I also use a lot of basswood sheets for my exterior walls on my models. It cuts very easy and with less power and runs and if glued on a supporting structure there is no disadvantage over plywood. Monkeysarefun, Looking at the burned paper and the tabletop of your laser, it seems you get too much "backfire." The more powerful lasers come with a honeycomb table to prevent the laser light to get reflected back to the material you cut. Even with my honeycomb insert, I use an old plywood pieces under the paper to catch most of the laser light. For bricks, I use the engraving feature of the laser. After I have drawn the bricks, I change the entire drawing to bmp. It is slower to engrave than scribe but in my opinion it looks more natural.

I am still learning the British scale and did not realize that 7mm is similar to O scale here.

I never had much success with MDF but your cast iron bridge piece looks great. For the Westbury shed, have you looked into birch plywood? Thin pieces like your wall and roof support might be stronger with plywood than MDF.