In our second assignment we were tasked to build a box. This assignment was made to showcase some of the skills that we have learned from our “Putting things together” workshop in class. As easy as the task may sound, making a box for me came with a few challenges. Through this post I will discuss some of the challenges and some of triumphs that I have encountered in making my box.

Before I started building anything, I set out with a vision to make my box as simple and sleek as possible, sort of like an ikea model of a box. So I decided to go with .5 in. thick plywood for my choice of wood so as to stay safe from from my wood chipping when drilling but also to not have very thick plywood which wood require longer screws.  I then went to Fernando for help and let him know my vision for my box. We decided we would make all 3 (1, base and 2 sides) sides 6″ x 6″ and two 6″x 5″ to fit in between the other two sides to complete a 6″ x 6″ x 6″ open cube (.5 in. plywood).  We then got to work with the table saw to cut these

5 pieces (I later got Jeremy to cut me up a few duplicates just in case I messed up in putting them together. After that we went ahead and used the router to round the edges up. Then came putting it all together. I decided to use flat head wood screws so with counter sinking them they wouldn’t protrude. Using the corner clamps and regular clamps I was able to put all my sides together to make my box!

 

I think most of my failures came while I was putting everything together. I was able to successfully able to put the box together but there were some challenging aspects. I made sure to use a pilot hole (1/8th in. drill bit) first before putting my screws in but after putting them in although I saw no splits I wasn’t able to fully countersink most of them. A better alternative would have been the kreg jig, which would have completely made the screws invisible. Another failure that I experienced was a gap that was created between two of my side pieces while screwing. In order to account for that I made sure the sides went up against each other which meant that I would have a protruding base on one side. I though a quick and an easy fix to that would have been If I ran my box (before the screws went in through that side) over the belt sander to even everything out. To my misery

however the belt sander was to powerful and messed with my rounded edges on the base and so I decided to s

top before messing it up further and tried my best to clean up with the hand held sander. That didn’t work as well either so I tried filing, which I had used to round the corners some more, the base to clean it up a bit more and  but once I saw that started to damage my box even more I decided to stop. This failure happened because through research did for my cost analysis, 0.5 in. plywood is actually 0.472 in. in thickness which when adding up the differences could account for the gap created when I tried to fit  the 5″ wide side in between two 6″ wide sides. Knowing this and using the belt sander on the base alone could have helped resolve the issue.

 

 

Upon completion we were also tasked with making a cost analysis for the project itself (See figure 6). Using hardware stores and their prices for the raw materials I used and keeping track of the amount of time and labor that went in I was able to arrive at a cost of $2.14 for the raw materials and a whopping 3 hrs for time and labor put in by me and the lab techs that helped me. If we have labor at $20/ hr, making the box would come out to $62.14 in total. For the cost of raw materials I was really surprised on how low it was but for time and labor believe I could have been more efficient, which is a good lesson to take away for the upcoming projects for this class!