This last week, Ayaan and I worked together in building a crate! We learned very valuable woodworking skills such as how to plane wood, route, sand (properly), and finish the crate! it was an great experience and bellow are some photos of us throughout our process!

mATERIALS

• Wood: 4.50/ft = 20$
• Screws: 6$
• Spray Paint: 6$
• Labor (10$/hr): 12hrs, 2 woodworkers, 240$
• Total: $272

CUTTING WOOD

We began with cutting wood! The first part of the process for cutting out wood was selecting the pieces we wanted. There were multiple planks of wood for us to choose, but we looked for pieces that weren’t damaged with slits and looked relatively clean. Then we took turn marking and cutting the wood for efficiency. We cut (9) 14″x4″,   (6)12″x4″ , and (4)1″x10″  pieces of wood, a total of 19 pieces.  Once our wood was cut we ran it though the planer to remove previous markings, and routed the wood for curved edges!

SANDING, PAINTING & DRYING 

 

After the wood was routed we sanded the wood starting at a low grit, and slowly working our way up to 3000 grit! It was the smoothest wood I had ever felt in my life. From there we decided to spray paint the wood with a clear matte coat for finishing purposes. We let the wood dry overnight outside.

SANDING AGAIN, MEASURING, DRILLING & SANDING AGAIN 

 

Unfortunately, the clear matte coat caused our beautifully sanded wood to get rough again. To get the wood smooth again, we sanded again! We  started this time at a grit of 320 and worked up to 1000grit. We then measured and marked where we were going to drill our pieces together. We drilled three outer boxes, then attached the base, and lastly drilled in the inner supports. We used a scrap pieces of wood to measure the distance between each layer of the box. The third photo above is of Ayaan and I working together to get these scrap pieces out of our box because we had accidently trapped them in. Once the box was together, we finished with sanding the box one last time with 2000 and 3000 grit sandpaper. Making this the smoothest crate ever! In addition, the matte coat resulted in being a blessing in disguise because when we sanded it down, we actually were buffing the crate, making it shiny and beautiful!

RESULTS 

Cleaning because we love the OEDK!!!

  

– Isa 🙂