Making of the box:
Our first assignment was to make a box out of wood. Simple right? Well, yes and no.
My first step was to get some scrap wood and cut it down into four 7 inch pieces.

I marked out 7 inch sections onto a long piece of 2 x 4. My markings seem to have been a bit off because after setting up the saw in the woodshop to cut 7 inch pieces, the marks that I made did not seem to line up (as you can see on the left side of the picture)…odd. But it turned out fine so oh well. I also decided to rout the edges of my wood at this point because I figured it would be easier than if I did it after assembling the box.

I then laid out the box the way that I wanted to put it together and realized that some of the sides would also be on the outside and would have to be routed. I wanted to put the box together in this overlapping kind of manner because I wanted the box to be square without having to recut the wood.

The problem with that was that the sides of the router don’t go in far enough the support the 2×4 in that orientation. To solve this I clamped two of the pieces of wood together to present a longer profile to the router.
      

This helped but those edges still ended up less uniform and pretty than the other sides. 🙁

After the sides were all cut and routed, I attached two sides together using the Kreg Jig twice leaving me with two corners (Sorry I forgot to take pictures of this part). I wanted to attach all the sides together that way so that no screws are immediately visible but unfortunately the sides of the box were big enough to allow me to get the drill inside. Because I still didn’t want to have any screws visible I decided that the best way to achieve that would be to simply attach each corner part to the bottom piece of wood rather than having them attached to each other. While this did work and do what I wanted it to, there were some other downsides to this tactic as I later found out.

For my bottom piece, I found a piece of scrap plywood and laid out my corner pieces on top and traced the outline out and cut it out using the jig saw. I then flipped it over, clamped everything together and drilled out pilot holes for the screws. I also made sure to countersink the screws using a bigger drill bit so that the screws would be flush with the wood (especially important because it was going in the bottom of the box). I also checked to make sure that these screws wouldn’t hit the screws used to put the corners together hence the odd positioning of some of the screws in the bottom.
   

Once I was done with that, I had a box! I sanded down some of the edges by hand that were a little too rough or sharp but other than that I was pretty much done. It is not a perfect box certainly, there are some gaps in the sides (the downside mentioned earlier) that could have been avoided with more careful sanding and cutting but I am still pretty proud of what I made and I think that I’ve learned a lot.
    

Cost Analysis:
Raw Materials (all prices from Home Depot):
28 inches of 2×4:
$2.87 for 96 inches
(2.87/96) = (x/28)
x = $0.84

72.25 in.² of 3/4 inch plywood
$26.16 for 4 ft x 4 ft
(26.16/2304) = (x/72.25)
x = $0.82

4 wood screws (1-3/4 inches)
$7.98 for 143
(7.98/143) = (x/4)
x = $0.22

4 screws from the Kreg Jig Pocket Screw Set (1-1/2 inches)
$19.97 for 260
(19.97/260) = (x/4)
x = $0.31

Total materials cost: $2.19

Labor:
Time Spent: 4 hours
Minimum wage in Texas: $7.25
4 * 7.25 = $29.00

Total labor cost: $29.00

Machine Time (tool rental cost from Home Depot):
Jig Saw: $12.00 per 4 hours = $12.00

Cordless Drill: $13.00 per 4 hours = $13.00

Router (no router available for rental but calculated using the purchase price compared to rental price of jig saw times purchase price of router): $24.00 per 4 hours = $24.00

Total machine time cost: $49.00

Total Cost of Project: $80.19