Hi, it’s Anna with our first real homework project- make a cleanly put together box.
I decided to make a 9″ by 9″ by 6″ box with 3/4″ plywood to go on top of my bookshelf and create more storage. After seeing the wonders of the Kreg jig, I chose to use this nifty tool to inset all of my screws and have none showing externally. 
I drew up some plans and… oh, there are no lab assistants hired yet? Okay, I’ll wait.
*4 days later* Alright! Let’s do this. I went to the wood shop and found a lovely piece of plywood, and got help cutting it on the table saw from Liz. I wanted to adjust the router bit, so Joe showed me how to fiddle with the height of the bit and use the router.
Look at that little rounded edge!
Then… well it would really help if we had more than one Kreg jig. Annabel and I had our schedules synced on this project- great company, except when we need the same tool for different thicknesses of wood and would have to switch settings to share. I took some time to sand and smooth out my pieces.
*1 day later* Okay, Kreg jig time! …Where’d it go?? Fernando saved me and found it hiding in the return box to the cage downstairs. The device worked like a charm and gave me sets of uniform holes- now just to screw them together. I assembled them, first in pairs of sides, then to the base and finally the last sides to each other, carefully aligning and clamping the pieces.
And it was a box! A smooth, precise box… it looked like it could be a piece of children’s furniture from Ikea. Minimalist, rounded corners- yeah. I don’t know whether to be happy that I got it so uniform or slightly disappointed that it could be mistaken for a piece of industrially manufactured consumer goods.
I added a layer of walnut stain to make my box a little less bland. And we have a new addition to my dorm storage!
For this assignment I used around 320 sq. in. of 3/4-inch plywood ($5.27 worth of a $19 2’x4′ piece), 12 no.6 1-inch screws ($2.36 for 2 bags of 6), and a small amount of walnut gel stain ($0.32 worth of a $7.09 half pint can). I spent 5 1/2 hours start to finish, so at $20/hour the labor cost was $110 and material cost $7.95. Clearly this spends much more time than expensive material; I see why artisans tend to use more durable/expensive materials if they’re going to put that much work in. Total cost: $117.95.
