This week’s assignment took place in the wood shop. We were tasked with creating a crate to hold all of our future projects. I partnered up with Benji to form team strawberry. We went through many possible design themes for our crate in the brainstorming process such as a Super Mario Bros crate or a galaxy crate. Ultimately, we settled on a team strawberry themed crate with plans to give our crate an earthy look and a painted strawberry.
To kick off the building process, we picked out some 1×4 and 2×2 lumbar. We then set up a stop at the miter saw with some scrap wood so we could quickly and consistently cut the right sized pieces. After all the wood was cut, we got right to work sanding all the pieces to 300 grit before setting them up in the corner clamp to secure while we drilled pilot holes, counter sinks, and screwed the pieces together. To make this process more efficient we used three drills each with a separate bit so that we didn’t need to waste time switching bits.
After we assembled 4 pieces into a 12in x 16in rectangle shape, we routed the outside edges with a round-over bit. Once we had three of these rectangles we chose the nicest looking one to be the top and another one to be he bottom. For the top, we routed the inside edges and for the bottom we marked out where the three bottom slats would go and screwed those into place.
Once we had all three rectangles assembled, it was time to screw the 11in 2x2s into place. We started with the 2x2s in the 4 corners of the bottom rectangle and went from there drilling pilot holes and screwing the wood into place. After that we added some spacers in between before sliding on the next rectangle and repeated the process until our crate was assembled!
After assembly we used a combination of the oscillating sander and hand sanding with progressively higher grits of sandpaper all the way up to 1000 grit. Once we were satisfied with the smoothness of our crate we decided on a medium toned brown stain and made sure to get in every corner of our box. We then made the decision to add rope handles to our box. After looking in the parts bins of the OEDK, we found some brass couplings that fit the rope very well. After hunting for a 3/4 in drill bit with a lab tech, we drilled some equally spaced holes on each of the shorter 12 in sides of our box.
To reduce tear-out when using such a big bit, we clamped another piece of scrap wood under the surface we were drilling and this made a huge difference in the amount of tear-out we got. We fed the nylon rope through the couplings, melted the ends and fed the other end through the box. After the rope was fed through, we added the second coupling and melted the other end of the rope. We then repeated this for the other side. Then we used some acrylic paints I had in my apartment to paint the strawberry on the middle slat of the long side to finish our box. Then all that was left was to take a team picture and we had a finished team strawberry themed crate!
Cost Analysis:
Material costs:
8ft long 1×4 lumbar (2.5 pieces) – $4.38/piece is $10.95 for 2.5 pieces (Lowes.com)
8ft long 2×2 lumbar (1 piece) – $3.38 (Lowes.com)
Nylon rope (2 ft) – $76.78 for 100ft roll is $1.54 for 2 ft (Lowes.com)
3/4 in brass couplings (4) – free from OEDK parts bins
Acrylic paint (negligible amount) – free
Total (material cost) – $15.87
Labor costs:
We spent 2.5 hours on assembly, 1 hour sanding and staining, 0.5 hours painting, and 1.5 hours attaching the handles. This adds up to 5.5 hours two people spent on this crate. If our time is valued at the average for a Houston woodwork of $17/hour, this crate costs $93.5 in labor.
Total: This crate costs $109.37.
