The past two weeks, our class has been focused on learning the basics of woodworking and finishing wood, all culminating in us making our own wooden crates/boxes. Although I have done some woodworking in the past, it was quite some time ago (during my 8th grade tech-ed class). My partner (Coby) and I decided to get a head start on this project and began working right away over labor day weekend. We first cut our own wood for the project using the miter saw (which I honestly found quite fun, except for the scorching heat in the woodshop). 

Next, we performed some rough sanding on our wood to get rid of any major defects before starting to screw everything together. After my experience this summer putting together large quantities of IKEA furniture for my apartment, I feel fairly comfortable drilling things together, so I felt pretty comfortable with this part of the assignment. Between the two of us, we were able to get our three frames assembled fairly quickly, as well as create our base.  

The next part is when things stopped going so perfectly. We attached our vertical supports to the corner of our base, and then started trying to slide our frames around them. Unfortunately, either our frames weren’t rectangular or our vertical supports were extremely crooked, because we had quite a challenge doing so. After some sanding and maneuvering, we were finally able to get the frames into the correct positions – however, we still found that we had gaps between two of the posts and the side of our top frame, a fault we decided we would just have to accept.

A second problem we faced was that our vertical supports were taller than our box, which we found a bit bothersome aesthetically. Coby had the idea of using a handsaw to cut down the supports to the height of the rest of the box, which was a great plan – he took the lead on the sawing, and while it was a lot of work, it made our crate look significantly better.

In class the next week, we began finishing up our box. We started out by sanding all of the surfaces down until they were nice and smooth, and then we stained it using a “dark walnut” colored oil. We chose this shade very arbitrarily based on what we found available, but it turned out to look great! Other than getting oil all over our hands, it was also super easy to apply. The only issue was that the oil we chose was running extremely low, meaning that at the end we were basically scraping it out of the container to finish coating our box, but we were able to get everything covered.

In general, I had a lot of fun with this project, and could see myself doing more woodworking in the future!

Cost:

Cost Type	Cost	Price	Source	Quantity	Total
Materials	1×4 Board	$0.03625/in	Lowe’s	202.5”	$7.34
	2×2 Board	$0.03625/in	Lowe’s	40”	$1.45
	Screws	$0.0371	Ace	48	$1.78
Labor	Woodworking Operator	$21/hr, 2 people	ZipRecruiter	30 min (cutting wood)	$21
	Prototyping Engineer (You!)	$38/hr, 2 people	ZipRecruiter	4 hours	$304
Overhead	Facility Cost (Machine Time)	Assume 15% of labor and materials	Rockler	N/A	$50.34
	Quality Control	Checked quality during prototyping (included in labor)	N/A	N/A	$0
Design	Engineering and Development	Most design done in advance – just followed instructions	N/A	N/A	$0
	Iterations	1	N/A	N/A	$0
Misc.	Waste and Scrap	$0.03625/in	Same as materials sources	1 extra 12” 1×4, approx. 1 extra 10” 2×2 (22” total)	$0.80
Total	$386.71