Hey guys, welcome to build a box week! This project was definitely a bit more time-intensive than the apron last week, and required a lot of different skills. However, I did feel more confident with (most) of the tools this week from previous experience with woodworking, so that was a plus! Let’s go through the box-making process:

Hannah and I had our wood pre-cut, so we began by creating the frame of our crate. This required 3 different drill bits: a 1/8 inch bit to make the initial hole, a 5/16 inch bit to create a countersink, and finally the Phillips head driver to drill the two pieces of wood together. The only real challenge I felt we had with this process was with the countersink bit. We had trouble determining which speed led to the least amount of split wood, and finally figured out that going slow and then fast was the most successful for us.

Once we had our 3 frames put together, we went on to get rid of the problematic, black sections of wood with a rasp file. A lot of our wood had these sections (which I pictured below), and we wanted to get rid of them for overall aesthetic. The rasp file was excellent for this, and the orbital sander was helpful as well. We then put the bottom pieces on our crate using a drill.

Next we moved onto the (attempted) routing part of our crate. Neither Hannah nor I had used a hand router before, so this was a disaster. The first mistake we made was testing the router on our crate instead of a test piece of wood; the router absolutely obliterated our wood. We then tried it on a piece of test wood and had a similar problem, and decided to call it a night and start fresh the next day. After having the same exact problem, we had Dr. Wettergreen come give us some guidance, and found out that the router bit was not tightened all the way and could have hurt all of us (sorry Dr. Wettergreen!). After having a near miss we just stopped routing and moved onto sanding our box.

Sanding was for sure the longest part of the process for us, as we had to sand all the pieces of wood and the parts that we had tried using the router on. The 120 and 320 grits got our crate nice and smooth, and helped to hide the routing attempts.

Next, we connected the frames + bottom of the box to the 2x2s with the power drill. During this process, we noticed some screws on our frames were coming loose and had left gaps, so we had to fix that.

Lastly, Hannah and I stained our box with the medium stain color. We did one coat in the morning, let it dry for 5 hours, a second coat in the evening, and let that dry for 2 hours. Afterwards, we applied an oil to the box for a final, polished look.

While the box is functional, here are a few things I would improve on if I did it again:

1. Sanding and staining each piece of wood before assembly would have made the process faster and the stain look more uniform.
2. Knowing how to correctly attach the router bit would have saved our wood and protected us from a near miss. Our edges would have looked nicer too!
3. Applying less stain to the wood would have made our box less dark than it is.
4. Having a solid game plan before going in –> a more streamlined process

Cost Analysis:

• 1×4 Wood: $3.32/8ft * 16.875 ft = $7.00
• 2×2 Wood: $3.35/8ft * 3.33 ft    = $1.40
• Screws:       $6.87/50 screws * 60 screws = $8.24
• Sandpaper: $9.97/15 paper * 8 paper     = $5.32
• Stain:          $8.47/can * 1/10 can = $0.85
• Woodworking Operator: $19.07/hr * 8 hr  = $152.56
• Prototyping Engineer: $38/hr * 0.5 hr = $19
• Facility Costs (Overhead): $20/year for an orbital sander * 3 hours = $0.007
• Quality Control: $41/hr * 0.5 hr = $20.50
• Engineering and Development: $48/hr (I’d include this with prototyping/woodworking, so $0 for this)
• Iterations: $0
• Waste/Scrap: $0

TOTAL COST: $214.87