This week, our task was to build a crate. Easy enough – cut the wood, put the screws, sand and stain, piece of cake. My journey was not that easy. Since many (small) mistakes were made along the way, I will discuss each one as they come.
Cutting
I teamed up with Jhalak because our crate and design process was similar. We decided that, in the spirit of learning and in engineering, we should cut the wood ourselves. Since I had some experience with using a miter saw and wood cutting, I was confident that this would be simple. On the first Tuesday of this assignment, we met before class and measured out the pieces of wood we needed. We didn’t want to accidentally cut the wood too small, so we overcompensated and added an extra 1/2 – 1 inch to each piece of wood (mistake 1). Once the wood was cut, we planed each slice to fix the leveling, jointed the sides, then routed each corner (mistake #2). These three steps were arguably the most time consuming in the wood cutting portion of the assignment. Unfortunately, we didn’t get many photos from this part since we were on a time crunch, but here’s a quick video of us in the woodshop!
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Sanding
Once the wood was cut, we set to work sanding each piece to make them nice and smooth. We started with 40 grit, then transitioned to 120-grit, then 400-grit using the orbital sander. Since there were two of us, it was easy to create a small assembly line – Jhalak started with the lower grit, then passed the piece off to me to sand with a higher grit.
Sanding the wood planks. My victory face because we were finally done sanding!
On Thursday, we began assembly. It was at this stage that we realized some of the pieces that were supposed to be uniform were not the same length as the others (the 14.5 ” and 12″ slices had some variation). Since there needed to be uniformity to create an actual crate, we decided to saw the wood to size rather than going upstairs, finding a lab tech, and using the miter saw. The saw was too difficult to use, so we decided to sand down the pieces of wood to the size they had to be using the belt sander. Unfortunately, some slices had up to an inch of extra wood, so sanding would take a very long time. Fortunately for us, I had some experience with the band saw, and with the help of an ODEK assistant, we were on our way to fixing mistake #1. Once the wood was cut to size, we used the belt sander to sand off any small parts that didn’t get cut properly. This however, led to mistake #3 – overcompensation and uneven ends. Some of the wood slices were a little smaller than expected. But for all the pieces to fit together in a box, they had to be the same size. So we took the smallest size and resized the rest of the wood to it.
Jhalak trying to use a saw and using the belt sander. Cutting the wood to size using the band saw!
Assembly
After 1.5 days of cutting and sanding, we were ready to assemble the three box portions of the crate. Now we had to measure where to put the screws, which took much longer than expected. Mistake #2 came back to bite us – because the ends were rounded (and slightly angled because we sanded the rounded edges with a bit too much pressure with the orbital sander) the wood pieces were not sitting straight on the table. It was a little difficult to determine how long each piece of wood was, so drawing the hole points took a while.
Once the measurements were made, we used the angle clamp, put the wood joints together, and started drilling. We drilled the hole with a 1/8th drill bit, countersunk the hole with a 1/4th drill bit, then screwed the joints with some wood screws. There was a slight learning curve with removing the drill bit and reattaching a new one, but Jhalak and I are now semi-pros at it!
Jhalak putting the wood pieces together. The main components of the box complete!
Some additional issues we ran into at this stage included some splitting wood (which would have split further if we screwed right into it), and some wood chips coming off where we screwed the screws. With some advice from Dr. Wettergreen, we used some wood glue to close the gaps:
By the end of day 2, we had completed the three main components of the crate.
At the start of day 3, we set about putting the final pieces of the box together. First, we started with the base of the box with our remaining 14.5″ wood planks. Unfortunately, mistake 2 and 3 caught up with us again – the planks were too small for the base and did not sit together nicely. So we decided to cut 3 more pieces of wood (this included sanding, but not routing). With some additional cutting with the band saw and sanding with the belt sander, the base was good to go and fit nicely at the bottom of our box!
We measured where the final 11″ wood columns should go, determined the spacing between the three box components with clamps, and set to putting it together! We met one final challenge in this stage. Our mistake #2 came back to haunt us one final time – the second box piece would not sit well on top of the first box piece – the box was slightly too small for how big the first box piece was, so we were seeing some gappage (the screws popped out when we tried to force it onto the wood columns). We debated between cutting another plank, but it was close to 8 pm at that point. Fortunately, when we were making the planks smaller with the band saw, I had saved a piece of wood, with was exactly the size of the gap below in the picture!
We glued it on, clamped it, and waited for it to dry before attaching it on to the box. The rest of the assembly went by smoothly after.
Post-processing (staining!)
The crate is done! We decided to stain it because we liked the look of it. We chose the red color to differentiate between the other boxes, and it turned out great! We managed to get the stain into all the cracks so it didn’t have a jointed look (at least at 10 pm at night it didn’t seem so). Our beautiful box is done!
Cost and Final Thoughts
The overall cost of this box is as follows:
- 9 x 14.5” long pieces of 1×4 lumber = $15.14
- 6 x 12” long pieces of 1×4 lumber = $7.57
- 4 x 10-11” long pieces of 2×2 lumber = $5.28
- 1.25” long wood screws = $9.99
- Woodstain = $6.98
- Labor: 13 hours x 2 people x $7.25/hour = $188.5
Total cost = $233.46
Sources:
Some final thoughts and lessons I learned through this:
- A partner is always helpful! We bounced a ton of ideas off each other and overcame many of the obstacles that came at us
- Don’t overcompensate too much! You’ll end up doing a ton of work to fix the extra inch or two, which is not worth it in the end.
- Learn as you go! We got to use several tools that we weren’t taught in the class. We had fun with the process, looked at how things could be made easier, and learned as much as we could.!
- Wood working is hard, but it’s super rewarding when you have an awesome looking finished product in the end!
