For the building a crate project, I partnered with Jonathan to build the crate using wood working and post processing skills. We opted for the beginner difficulty because I was relatively new to wood working

Materials

We were already given precut wood to begin with so it made assembly a lot easier. We used 9 x 14.5” long pieces of 1×4 lumber, 6 x 12” long pieces of 1×4 lumber, 4 x 10-11” long pieces of 2×2 lumber. We also used safety equipment such as gloves, safety glasses, and facemasks.

Additionally, we also used many tools such as:

Drills and drill bits

Screws (1.25 in. long)

Orbital Sander and sand paper of 60, 120, 320, and 400 grit

Router

Wood Stain

Assembly

First, we created the frame of our box by drilling holes into lined up pieces of lumber to create our 3 layers of frame. This was relatively simple as we  pilot holed, countersink holed, and screwed 2 points into each piece of wood. We also had each piece clamped down by 90 degree clamps and hand clamps. When we were putting the frame together, we realize that the lumber that was given to us had defects and there were chunks of wood missing from corners or unevenness caused gaps in our frame. Our plan was to try and correct these imperfections through sanding and working around the defects.

We routed the edges of our wood with the router which gave us the desired result. However, we did notice that some of the routed edges would be less visible due to the nature of sanding the rest of the crate, so we could have done another around of routing. We thought that by routing earlier, it would provide a better finish as we would be able to route easier with 3 frames rather than an entire crate.

We then moved on to sanding where we started at the lowest possible grit to get the large defects out of the before going for finer details. The orbital sander did a pretty good job as we alternated to 120 and 320 for each face. Although my hand felt like mush at this point; for some finer edges and faces, we hand sanded using the 400 level grit to get the smoothest outcome.

Our next step would have been to fixate the bottom 3 planks to the bottom frame and  Jonathan and I did so in similar fashion as we did to assemble the first three frames. We noticed that some of the screws that we put in were really close to the edges of the crate and noted that it may cause us trouble in the future especially if we plan to sand the box further. When attaching our vertical supports, we noticed large gaps between the frames and the corners of the support, originally we had 2 hand clamps stabilizing the crate to the working desk as we screwed the support in. However, we were quick to switch to just one clamp for the table and one in a diagonal fashion so that it pushes the vertical support outward towards the frame.

Jonathan and I lastly, re-sanded the newly attached parts with the orbital sander and the belt sander as there were larger pieces of uneven wood for our bottom of the crate. We cleaned our working area and vacuumed the sawdust as we prepare for post-processing.

I am not going to say that our post-processing was an absolute disaster, but we picked an ocean blue for our strainer and per following the instructions on the can, only certain parts of the crate was stained. It became even more apparent after a few hours that the stain did not fully stick as there were splotches of blue on our crate. We opted not to stain the inside blue after we saw the results and left it for another day.

We came in the next day for help and a TA recommended to try and re-stain a second coat with a darker stain and when we tried, it still seemed to have kept the blue residue and made staining the next coat even more difficult as there were less pores to stain. The inside of our crate looked really nice as that was a pure coat of the new stain. However, we theorize that the blue stained could have been very old as it is an unusual color that is not often used. We left the crate out to dry for an additional day before bringing it back inside.

Cost of Materials:

From Home Depot and Lowes the wood totaled to around: $22.36

Screws from Amazon: $4.80

Home Depot Wood Stains: $30

Overhead: $150

Average Salary: $22.11 * 7 = $154.77

Total: $364.60