After fighting an uphill battle with a sewing machine last week, building something out of solid materials was a welcome change. When I was a kid, I built a small clock and gave it a clearcoat, but by “built” I really mean “watched my grandpa make a clock while I occasionally made things worse.” Suffice to say, my woodworking experience is pretty much nil, but I’m very proud of what Tiffany and I made. Here’s how we did it:
Level 1: Sanding 1.0
Tiffany and I originally planned to cut our own wood, but we ultimately settled on pre-cut planks after uncut stock ran low. With pre-cut pieces in hand, we sanded these with a round of low-grit and high-grit sandpaper to get an initial smooth surface. This part was easy, and left us feeling way too confident for building the rest of the project.
See also: indisputable evidence we cleaned!
Level 2: Frames
With nice, sanded building blocks, we began assembling our outer frames. We forwent the instructions for this part, because who needs ’em? We built nice perfectly square frames by building our 14.5″ pieces into one another on each side. For each corner, Tiffany measured and marked two points into which I drilled 1/8″ pilot holes. I then drilled countersinks over each pilot hole using a 5/16″ bit. Lastly, we filled each hole with a 1.25″ wood screw and repeated for each frame. Unfortunately, building nice, square frames meant we ran out of long planks and had totally wrong dimensions for the bottom of our crate.
Look at him and his blissful ignorance. He doesn’t realize he’ll have to undo all of this later.
Finally referring back to the instructions, we realized we needed 2 12″ planks for the ends and 2 14.5″ planks for the sides of the frames. With no other good options, we disassembled our frames and reassembled them correctly, leaving unfortunate awkward holes on the sides where we originally connected the 14.5″ planks together. We used the worst planks with the roughest edges for the top frame, which we routed to cure the edges and add a smooth curve. With this, we had three nice frames to use for the outside of the box.
Level 3: Bottom and Vertical Supports
With new, correct frames assembled, our 12″ planks fit perfectly into our bottom frame and we were able to assemble the bottom using the same pilot and countersink method:
Unfortunately, one of our screws went through the bottom of the crate. To somewhat remedy this, we later decided to make wood putty out of wood glue and the sawdust from the power sanders.
We applied the wood putty to the exposed screw, filling in the hole with some success and hiding our mistake with a somewhat less heinous mistake. Even still, the problem plank eventually fell out, and we had to pull the screws back and reinsert them at a better angle.
With a completed bottom, we used the awkward holes leftover from our big frame mistake to attach the vertical supports to our bottom frame. With this, we used extra 1×4 planks to space out our remaining frames as we slid them into place. At the end of the second day, we had this:
Level 4: Sanding 2.0 and Finishing
With our assembled box, we were able to easily attach the rest of the frames to the vertical supports partially using the leftover holes from before. After some fumbling with files, we eventually settled on hitting the box with three more levels of sanding in preparation for finishing, getting all of the edges (mostly) uniform.
Sanding complete, we took our smooth crate outside to hit it with walnut-colored stain. After one coat of stain, the character of the wood showed beautifully and we decided to forego a second layer and clearcoat. The box was finished and beautiful, and I’m quite proud of the final product:
Cost Estimate
~202.5 in of 1×4 wood planks at $0.091/in: $18.41
~44 in of 2×2 wood planks at $0.037/in: $1.65
~56 1.25″ wood screws at $0.117/screw: $6.57
~6 oz Dark Walnut wood stain at $1.25/oz: $7.49
~7.5 hours tool use at $15/hr: $112.50
~18 hours labor at $7.25/hr: $130.50
Total: $277.12
