For the “Build a Crate” assignment, Kart and I went with a standard, run-of-the-mill wooden crate. Our final product is definitely far from perfect, but we learned a lot along the way!

We decided to go with pre-cut wood, but noticed that the wood was slightly warped. So our first task was to use the jointer to flatten our lumber pieces. Afterward, we used a hand router to bevel our edges and sanded the wood down to make it smoother and remove any marks on the wood.

We went with a simple, round edge, although we later realized we had routed too many edges, since edges of the longer pieces of wood wouldn’t need rounding as they should provide a flat edge to join with screws.

After sanding, we got started with the assembly.

We joined wood in groups of four into frames for the crate. We did encounter a bit of cracking (re: image below), but it didn’t seem to compromise the integrity of the wood.

We parallelized the work, using multiple drills so one person could pre-drill the holes for the screws, another could countersink, and we ended with drilling in the nails. There was definitely quite a bit of creativity needed in clamping the wood down.

 

One of the biggest challenges we encountered was that our frames seemed to be ever-so-slightly different sizes, causing our inner pillar wood pieces to not fit inside all frames. We solved this by unscrewing and moving two of the pillars, then drilling them back to be flush with the frames.

We finished by polishing and conditioning our wooden crate with beeswax. The final crate is as below:

Our cleaned workspace:

Cost:

• 1×4 lumber is $2.87 per 8-feet from Home Depot. Given we used about 17 feet of 1×4 wood, that comes out to be around $6.10.
• 2×2 lumber is $9.97 per 3-feet from Home Depot. Given we used about 3.5 feet of 2×2 wood, that comes out to be around $11.63.
• Screws from Home Depot is about $10.00 for 100. We used 78 screws which is a cost of $7.80.
• Beeswax “Feed-N-Wax Wood Polish & Conditioner” is $4.29 for 4 fl. oz.
• Labor: ZipRecruiter gives an average Texas woodworker salary at $21 per hour. Two people working 6.5 hours each is a total of $273.
• Total: $295.02