Background
Over the last few weeks, Madison and I worked together to build our first crate. We each had a bit of woodworking experience from ENGI 120 but had not previously used a miter saw or router.
The Process
We started early and were some of the first to pick out and cut our wood. Somehow, though, the quality of our wood was still poor and prone to large splinters. On day one, we measured and cut 9 pieces of 14.5” 1×4 lumber, 6 pieces of 12” 1×4 lumber, 4 pieces of 10″ 2×2 lumber using the miter saw. Our first error occurred here when we forgot to account for the width of the saw blade in our measurements. After cutting all of our wood, we started to route the edges but were only able to do one piece before the router broke.
The next time we worked on the crate was during class, when we sanded all of our wood by hand and with the orbital sander. The router was fixed a few days later, so we were finally able to route all of our pieces.
Once all the edges were sufficiently rounded, we started to assemble the frames. Here, we encountered a few errors when we accidentally drilled holes in the wrong place or drilled too close to the edge of a plank and had to re-drill and fill the hole using saw dust and wood glue.
We returned a few days later to complete the final steps of our crate: assembling the frames and staining the wood. This part was rather easy, since we had become more comfortable with the drilling process. The only issue we encountered here was that once our crate was assembled, we realized that it was wobbly. We tried to correct this by filing and sanding down the bottom, but we did not notice any significant difference.
Finally, it was time to stain our crate. We initially chose the weathered oak stain, but we did not like the grayish coat it created, so we instead switched to the cherry stain. The issue here is that, since our wood was not completely smooth, the stain would get caught and pool in the blemishes, creating an uneven coat. We did our best to even it out, but eventually decided to embrace the marbled effect. Here is our finished crate!
Cost Estimate
2″ x 2″ x 8′ wood (Home Depot): $2.98
1″ x 4″ x 8′ wood (Home Depot) x 2: $5.96
110 pack of 1.5″ wood screws (Home Depot): $12.38
8 oz Cherry wood stain (Home Depot): $7.28
10 hours of labor, $10 an hour: $100
Total: $128.6
