Over the past two weeks, Janie and I have been working together to build a crate. Even though we kept ours relatively simple, it was a challenging process and I learned a lot. Here’s how it went!

To start, we had to measure and cut the wood we needed to make the crate. We made a rough sketch of how all of the boards would go together to make sure we understood the project, then we got to measuring. When we measured, we decided to account for the width of the saw blade so the boards would be as close to the target dimensions as possible. Then, we cut our boards with a miter saw. After cutting all of our pieces, we did most of our sanding since we figured it would be harder to do once it was assembled. We primarily used orbital sanders, but did some sanding by hand to touch up certain areas.

To begin assembly, we used a corner clamp to secure the boards together, and then secured the corner clamp to the table with two more clamps. It was kind of difficult to get the two clamps to reach where they needed to go on the corner clamp, but after some trial and error, we found that C clamps could reach a bit further and make this easier. After our boards were secure, we pre-drilled two holes in the boards (which we positioned using a paper template for consistency) then used a countersink bit to drill shallow holes on top of these so the head of the screw wouldn’t stick out. Then, we could put in our screws. Once we had our first corner assembled, we repeated the same process for three more corners until we had a complete square frame.

Unfortunately, after we had put together our first frame, we realized that we had the 12″ boards butting into the 14.5″ boards, when we had meant to assemble them the other way around. We both felt kind of silly here because our sketch was correct and we had discussed and agreed on the correct way, but we just clamped the boards wrong and didn’t notice before putting in the screws. Since we had already put screws in and the boards would have holes in the incorrect place if we took them out and redid it, we decided to just keep going with the orientation we had, and assembled two more frames in the same way as the first. 

Now that we had all of our frames, it was time to secure the boards that would make up the bottom of the box. Since our dimensions were incorrect, we had to use 4 14.5″ 1×4 boards instead of 3, but luckily, we had an extra. We had to cut these pieces to shorten them and then sand them down to make each one slightly narrower so they would fit, but we got them to work despite the changed dimensions (and they fit really nicely with no gaps :​) ). We clamped these in place on the table in one of our frames, measured to determine where to put our screws, pre-drilled holes with countersinking, and then put in our screws. Then, we repeated this process on the other side, and the bottom frame was complete.

With our frames done, we could put them together to make a box! First, we clamped our 11″ 2×2 pieces in the corners of the bottom frame, then marked where we planned to put the screws. After this, we put screws in, using the same pre-drilling and countersinking process that we used in earlier steps. We repeated this for each of our three frames, spacing each layer with some scrap plywood so the gaps between frames would be consistent. Since we put a screw into each side of the 2×2 piece, we had to be really careful about positioning them so that they wouldn’t hit the screws in the corners that held the frames together.

Now that we had our box fully assembled, we did a bit more sanding, especially around our countersunk screws. Unfortunately, many of our boards splintered when we drilled our countersink holes, so there were some stabby pieces left over that we wanted to clean up.

Finally, we moved onto finishing. We chose to use the cherry stain for our box since we wanted to go with a bolder color. Going piece by piece, we applied the stain with brushes then wiped it off with paper towels. This step was challenging at times, but I had a lot of fun with it. We started with the outside of the crate, then moved on to the inside, then did the bottom last. We had to be really careful not to miss any parts of the box in this step. You would think this is pretty easy to do, but some parts are really easy to forget about; for example, when Janie and I flipped the box to do the bottom, we both realized that we hadn’t done the bottoms of the side boards that show on the top of each gap, and neither of us even thought about this part before that. Since we only wanted to do one coat of stain, now we just had to let it dry.

However, there was one more thing we wanted to fix. When we were working on assembly and staining, we kept noticing that one board had a broken edge that was slightly raised and sharp. The piece was too big to remove without making the board look weird, and no amount of sanding made it less of a hazard. After it stabbed me and gave me a pretty intense splinter, fixing this became personal. After our stain had dried, I put some wood glue under this piece, tied it to keep it in place, and then let it dry. Once it was held in place by the first glue, I added some additional glue to fill gaps and smoothed it out. With this fix, this board became significantly less dangerous, and I can now sleep well knowing that it shouldn’t be able to viciously attack future users.

Reflecting on this project, I am really happy with our final product. We weren’t able to use the router on the corners of our boards since it wasn’t working during our first stages of assembly, but I think our edges still turned out quite well without this since we sanded them so the corners wouldn’t be too harsh. If I was to make another crate, I think I would make sure to plane the boards; our boards were in kind of rough shape, and even with lots of sanding, there were still some parts we couldn’t get smooth since they hadn’t been planed. I also would experiment more to find out how to prevent our countersink holes from splintering when we drilled them.

Cost estimate:

• ~18′ 1×4 wood:  $9
• ~4′ 2×2 wood: $1.50
• 64 1.5″ wood screws: $7
• 10 hrs labor at $10/hr: $200
• Machine time (estimate): $15

Total cost: $232.50