This past few weeks, I worked with Renee to make a wooden crate.

First, we drew out a sketch of the dimensions of the overall crate and the pieces we needed to cut. We marked out our cuts, keeping in mind kerf, and then used a miter saw to make the cuts.

Taking our cuts downstairs, we roughly sanded them down to avoid splinters.

Then, we drilled the four sides of the bottom layer of our crate together. We repeated this twice so we ended with three rectangular pieces. At this point, however, we realized we put together our pieces in an incorrect orientation. The intended orientation was to have the 12″ boards outside the ~15″ boards, but we accidentally flipped the orientation so that the rectangular pieces were more square.

We also ran into an issue where our wood would (!!) split when we countersunk:

We attempted to sand down these later on, to make them less intrusive, but they still end up being visible in the final product.

Moving on, we tried to create the bottom of the crate. Because our orientation was messed up, the boards we intended to use for the bottom of the crate didn’t fit. Luckily, we had cut an extra piece, and we sanded down four ~15″ boards to fit the bottom of the crate, and we drilled them in.

The next step was to install the four posts, which required using a lot of clamps:

After installing these posts, we used scrap wood to determine spacing between our rectangular pieces, and then used more clamps to help us install the upper two rectangle pieces:

We ended up having a bit of extra 2×2 post sticking up out from the top of the crate, so we hand-sawed what we could and then sanded down to make the top of the crate flush. Then, we holistically sanded the crate down and vacuumed the sawdust out. Finally, we stained the crate using the cherry wood stain.

Reflection

Overall, I was satisfied with how the crate turned out, especially after using the wood stain which Renee and I thought looked nice with the wood we used. We didn’t route the edges because the router was off-and-on throughout; however, we tried to sand down the edges to make them less sharp. Another pain point was the wood splintering — after the fact, I wonder if using a smaller drill bit or changing the settings of the drill would help prevent this issue.

Cost Estimate

• ~18′ 1×4 wood: ~$9 (Home Depot)
• ~4′ 2×2 wood: ~$1.50 (Home Depot)
• 64 1.5″ wood screws: ~$2 (Lowes)
• Labor ($10/hr for 10 hr, for two people): $200

Total: $212.50