Hi! We are back with a “fun” project for this week. We were given given a lesson on various woodworking techniques and then given freedom to create a crate. Here is how it went for me and my partner, Emily:

We began with pre-cut wood, and immediately dove into screwing our box together. This part was not all that bad, but we did notice that our countersink holes were splintering our wood quite a bit. We played around with different speeds and bits, but ultimately accepted our fate of having to sand out most of the imperfections.

This is the first thing we wish we would have done differently – we should have sanded and routed our edges before assembling any layers of the box. It make sanding the components difficult later on because we were working with squares of screwed together wood instead of just planks. Also, we would have been able to use the table router on our individual planks instead of the hand router – which gave us the most trouble during this process. We began using the hand router as we were instructed but noticed it was basically tearing our wood instead of routing it in a smooth way. We asked for assistance from a fellow classmate, and when he couldn’t figure out the issue, we recruited more help.

Turns out it takes 5 engineers to figure out how (not) to use a hand router. We opted to just continue on sanding our edges as smooth as we could since we were unsure how to use the router. Though we only attempted routing on one square of the frame, it’s edges were very very bad off, so we made sure to put it at the bottom of the box to hopefully minimize attention brought to it.

                                             

Our spirits were pretty down after the routing fiasco and having to sand the mistakes away for hours until our arms were sore – so we decided to take a day off and come back to finish the box over the weekend.

When we returned, we sanded a little more and then continued with putting our box together. We found that the further we got into putting the pieces together, the more some of the wood started coming apart. We may have used a little too large of an initial bit for our guide hole, but the wood was still holding together well enough that we could continue. We faced a little bit of the same problem again with the wood splintering near our countersink holes but after observing other groups we realized that a lot of teams were having the same problem.

Finally, we got to what would be the more creatively-free part of our box: staining! We opted for the medium tint stain and decided to put a coat of oil on to make it slightly glossy. Again, lessons were learned. We did not communicate on how much stain we were applying so some of our sides were heavily tinted while the others were slightly tinted. We went back in with a second coat later and attempted to even everything out as best we could. We were pretty defeated with how we thought our box looked at this point and just wanted to do something to make it look a little better, so we applied a coat of finishing oil and called it good(enough).

Overall, this project was not an extremely difficult one, I just think we could have taken our time and strategized a little bit more before diving into each part. But, if anything, now I know how NOT to build a box.

Cost Analysis:

Material	Cost	Amount	Quantity Needed	Total Cost
1×4 Boards	$4.68	8 ft	17 ft	$     9.95
2×2 Lumber	$3.48	8 ft	4 ft	$     1.74
1.5” Wood Screws	$6.98	75 ct	60	$     5.58
Sandpaper	$5.48	6, assorted grit	6	$     5.48
Stain	$7.98	8 oz	5 oz	$     4.99
Oil	$8.98	1 pint	4oz	$     2.25
Prototyping Engineer	$38	1 hr	1 hr	$   38.00
Woodworking Operator	$15	1 hr	5 hrs	$   75.00
Quality Assurance Analyst	$38	1 hr	1 hr	$   38.00
Facilities (tools included)	$10	1 hr	5 hrs	$   50.00
			Grand Total:	$ 230.99