Design

As I was looking at the boxes that were underway, I validated an opinion I already had: plywood will never be my first choice. I’ve worked with it before, and although it is cheap and strong, it’s hard to make pretty, and the fact that it’s laminated wood means that it’s hard to cut and screw into. Because of this, I decided to go with the other option: wood planks. They could be pine? It’s a light, soft wood. I wanted to have each face be as solid as possible. This meant I was constrained by the width of the board. I had seen another box that had 45 degree corners, and liked the way it looked. So I started by measuring out a square base, and used those dimensions to measure out the sides.

cutting the wood

First, I took the wood to the miter saw, set it to 45, and chopped away. It took me a while to get the wood to even fit because the board was so long. I had to adjust my markings because I had forgotten to leave room for the material that the saw would remove between my cuts. I also thought I broke the saw at one point because it got stuck in the down position. Fortunately, it was a fluke and all I had to do was pull a lever and it returned to its original position. This happened multiple times and I wonder if I was bringing the saw blade down too far and tripping some sort of safety. Then, after testing the sides out with the base, I noticed that one side was too wide. I recut it, and reassembled. In hindsight, I wish I had made more sides. The alignment of the saw blade must have been slightly off from 45, because there wasn’t a single orientation of sides that would connect without leaving a gap somewhere.

Assembly

Once I had each side cut out, I took them down to the drill press. I made a mark halfway down each piece and high enough to hit in the middle of the width of the base. I considered making more holes, but was concerned about the fact that the wood was considerably thinner at the 45 degree corners, and I wasn’t confident about sticking a screw in parallel with the grain.

With countersunk holes where I needed them, I clamped each side to the base piece and drilled in as slow as I could. I managed to get the screws in with minimal stripping of the head. There were still gaps in some of the corners, but I was pretty happy with how the bottom of the box looked. This type of box was definitely designed to be assembled using wood glue. I wish I’d had some plastic wood to fill in the gaps, especially where the screws are. I did end up using wood glue to make the lid out of scraps.

Post processing

I started with filing the edges down, as some corners were protruding by too much to remove with regular sanding. I then sanded the junctions between pieces with 120 grit sandpaper. Next I did a once over on the entire box with the 120 grit paper. Unfortunately, as I was thinking of ways to fill the hole left by the countersinking, I realized that my best bet was to fill it with a dowel, which meant I had to go back down to 60 grit to get the dowel down to the level of the sides of the box. I then did whole passes on the entire box incrementing all the way up to 400 grit. Finally, I added a layer of stain to the wood. I used my own stain because the OEDKs stain was all dried and gloppy. It wasn’t as uniform as I would’ve liked, and there are definitely still some scratches from the higher grit sandpaper. Overall, I’m pretty happy with the way that the box turned out and will be adding a handle to the lid at a later date.

Cost analysis

Wood: one 1 x 4  8 ft board ~ $3.50. Since I used about half, ~$1.75

Equipment: My 30 minutes on the miter saw and 30 minutes on the drill press would cost ~$4 for rental

Screws: At $0.07 a screw, my four screws would cost ~$0.24

Sandpaper: Probably about one sheet total used, so ~$0.46

Stain: Trace amounts used. Maybe 1/1oth of my 5 dollar can, so ~$0.50.

Labor: I spent a bit longer on this project than I have on others. I think I spent six hours at the OEDK working on it throughout the week. At my rate of $21 an hour, this comes out to $126

Total: $6.95 without labor and $132.95 with labor. Woodworking by hand is a very labor intensive construction process.