I only had one weekend to complete the box assignment, because the second weekend of the time available I’d be out of town visiting family. Luckily, the weekend I did have available was a long one with a holiday Monday. With more time, I would have liked to add handles, but all considered, I’m pretty happy with the end result. 

My husband and I have the beginnings of a home workshop in our garage- a workbench and a toolbox full of miscellaneous tools- mostly hand me downs from our families. We have most basic tools, but are trying to build a more comprehensive set of practical tools. That said, a side benefit of taking this course has been identifying tools to add to our toolbox. This week, we bought a corner clamp, an orbital sander, and a router. 

We don’t have a miter saw, so I cut the planks to length at the wood shop at OEDK with the help of a lab assistant. Once I had the planks cut to length, I used a coarse grit paper (80) on the orbital sander to sand all sides of all planks. I had some trouble with pieces/chunks peeling away. Some of that is still visible on the narrow edges of the 1x4s, but I was able to at least smooth most of those areas. I then repeated this process with a medium grit (150). 

Once the boards were prepped, I tried to organize them by quality. Using planks with more defects on the bottom of the box and facing them strategically to make the defects less apparent. 

Once I knew which planks were being used for which layer of the box, I started assembling the bottom rung of the box. For this step I used the corner clamp to align the planks, and drilled pilot holes. At first I had issues with the drill taking chunks out of the surface instead of creating a clean hole, which was then made worse once screws were installed. I found I was able to mostly resolve this by both moving my pilot holes slightly more inboard, and also making sure the drill speed was higher when starting the hole. Then I repeated the process for the middle and top rungs of the box. 

Once the rungs were assembled, I used the router to cut a ¼” radius along the top and bottom outside edges of all rungs. Here’s a quick before and after of the routed edges. In the after, you can see there is a line along the top where the router bit wasn’t at the exact right depth for this cut. I had plans to sand again, so I wasn’t too worried about that small edge. 

Once the edges were routed, I used the orbital sander with a higher grit (220) paper on all exterior surfaces of each rung. This smoothed the surfaces a bit further and also eliminated the small edge caused by the router. 

Next, I installed the planks to make the bottom surface of the box. I had to file the edges of these down just a bit to get them to fit. And then, using some scrap wood we had lying around as spacers, I finished the structure of the box by installing the 2×2 posts and screwing the rungs of the box into them. 

On our workday in class on Tuesday, I wanted to focus on finishing sanding and also complete staining. I used a file to break the edges of the 2×2 posts, and sanded those smooth a bit. Then I used 220 paper to hand sand all over. Hand sanding allowed me to get into some areas I wasn’t able to reach with the orbital sander. I finished with hand sanding all over with 320 grit paper. 

After wiping the box clean to remove any sawdust, I stained the box using the black stain. Here are some images of the box after staining but before it was done drying. 

Once the stain was dry, I did a gentle pass with very high grit sandpaper, and my box was complete! Here are some images of the finished product. 

 

Cost Type	Cost	Price	Source	Quantity	Total
Materials	1×4 Board	$3.32/8ft	Home Depot	17ft	$7.06
	Screws	$44.97 /848 screws	Home Depot	48	$2.55
	Sand Paper	$9.97  /15 discs	Home Depot	3 discs	$2.00
Labor	Woodworking Operator	$19.20/hr	Zip Recruiter	8hr	$153.60
	Prototyping Engineer	$38/hr	Zip Recruiter	1hr	$38
Overhead	Facility Cost (Machine Time)	$250/mo	Fin Models Lab	8hr	$12.50
	Quality Control	$20.56	indeed.com	.25hr	$5.14
Misc.	Waste and Scrap	$3.32/8ft		7ft wood	$2.91
TOTAL					$223.76