Having almost no prior experience with woodwork, this box-making project is certainly a learning experience for me.  Similar to any other learning, this one comes with trials and errors.

I started the by planning the dimensions of my box, its structure (especially the connection points), the size of each piece and the aesthetics.  This is a rough sketch of my box:

 

The width of the box was determined based on the dimension of the clear plastic bin under the ENGI210 table, which is 16″*16″.  I wanted my box to be rectangular, so I made the width 2″ shorter then the clear plastic bin.  The poles at the corners serve as connections points for the flat faces. The bottom of the box is made from a sheet of 14″*16″ plywood that is 1/4″ thick.

 

I cut my wood using the table saw at the OEDK woodshop and rounded the corners with the CNC router there, both under the supervision of a lab assistant. Then I sanded the rough surface of the wood with an orbital sander and smoothed the corners with sand papers by hand. Afterwards, I engraved some symbols onto my wood to make them look nice and also practice the laser cutting techniques we learned this past week.

 

Laser Cutting – Hard at work or hardly working?

 

 

 

Now the pieces of wood are ready to be put together into a box.  At first, I tried to attach the pole to the flat faces of the box using screws.  However, the heads of the screws are not flush with the outer surface of the wood, which can potentially cause injury to the user and is not aethestically pleasing.  Unfortunately, putting screws in cracked one of the poles, and caused blood shed when the screw kicked up into my hand……(I forgot to take a picture of the cracked wood for documentation purpose because I was running to the First Aid Station for a bandaid:/)

If anything I have learned from freshman engineering design last semester, that is, things usually don’t work in the first time, failures happen, and that is ok as long as the same mistake does not happen repeatedly.

After realizing it was a bad idea to put many screws into think pieces of wood like the poles, I turned to the Kreg Jig, which requires fewer connection points and only puts the small pointy end instead of the bigger end (the head) of the screw into the poles. Here is where another mistake happened:

Not being familiar with using Kreg Jig, I clamped the pole and the side of the box together to drill the pilot hole…Lesson learned – Think Twice and Drill Once.

Also, shoutout to lab tech John for correcting me and showing me the right way.

The rest of the “putting things together” went fairly smooth after this dumb mistake I made.  I put the two sides of the box together first, then mounted the front and back separately instead of going around from bottom to top or vice versa because doing flat surfaces first gave me more stability and made it easier for clamping.  Here are some prorgess photos:

 

I attached the bottom of the box last.  Due to the concern of cracking the thin piece of plywood, I only put in four 6×1 screws at the corners, and to add more strength to the box, I applied some wood glue before putting in the screws.

 

 

As for post processing, I applied a coat of natural wood color stain, and here is the final product:

My box cost approximately $315.65.  To see the cost breakdown, click this link.