When it came to this project, I knew it would be fairly easy and repetitive for me to simply complete it as instructed, so I looked on Pinterest as reccomended, to look for potential ideas to be more creative with it. When I came across a picture of a crate with diagonal slats instead of horizontal, I thought it would be a fun challenge. I quickly got permission from Dr. Wettergreen and reached out to my teammate, Mert to see if he was good with the idea, and he promptly agreed to try it.
Since we were going off of the instructions, we needed to make our own design. I booted up Autodesk Inventor and began designing a crate using the required size dimensions and the lumber we were told we would have access to. I sketched out some simple ideas, and then extruded each part seperately and combined them in a single assembly, using different colors for visual clarity. After a few hours of work and redesigning, my CAD model was complete and Mert and I were ready to begin cutting the wood.
Final design: Side View: Front/Back View
After design of the crate was completed and we were both satisfied with the result, Mert and I began cutting the wood. We measured our cuts thoroughly and cut with some extra space to save using the miter saw. We constructed the box as we went to check the precision of our cuts and used a belt sander for more fine adjustments. We saved the diagonal slats for last due to their difficulty.
After we had fully constructed the crate and cut all the wood, the next step was taking it all apart, rounding the edges of the wood using the router, and then promptly sanding every piece to a desired smoothness. We also used the planar to remove any undesirable markings that were left on the wood from potentially prior use or other sources. The 2x2s we were provided were of pretty inconsistent quality which caused some issues during routing and sanding, but we did our best to hide any small issues. The routing was also further complicated by the wood shop not being accessible at the times we were told, but we got almost everything done in time anyways.
We then reconstructed the box and sanded it further to make all our joints as smooth and flush as possible, but with just the hand orbital sander available, we were only able to make so much progress on some of the less accurate spots. Below is an image showing the crate at this step before post processing.
Finally, we proceeded to the finish. We originally were going to take it apart and stain the wood seperately before a final reconstruction, but neither of us were going to have the time for reconstructing the crate in the morning before noon and there was no more remaining stain other than some ugly colors we had already agreed not to use, so our ultimate decision was to spray paint the crate without taking it apart. I began with a black spray paint can, but unfortunately all the black spray paint cans seemed to be fairly low and I wasn’t able to get consistent coloration. I eventually found another can and finished the crate up with that. Hopefully, the finishing is a nice even glossy black.
We cleaned up all our workspaces as instructed every time we finished a step of our procedure or took a break from working.
