Welcome, fellow classmates and DIY lovers! Today, I’m thrilled to share with you the exciting journey I embarked upon in creating my very own customized box. This project allowed me to blend creativity, functionality, and a touch of personalization to bring my vision to life. Join me as I walk you through the process, step by step, and provide you with some highlights I had during my box-building adventure.
Materials and Tools:
For this project, I used a variety of materials and tools listed below:
– Wood
– Mitre Saw
– 1 1/4 ” Nails
– Sandpaper
– Paints and Brushes
-Router
– Measuring Tape
-Clamps
Step 1: Planning and Designing
Before diving into the hands-on work, I spent time meticulously planning and designing my box. By meticulous planning, I really mean just using the dimensions and specifications spelt out on the Engi 210 canvas page and rushing to the OEDK to be the first person to select the perfectly shaped woods to minimize my sanding time.
Step 2: Cutting and Shaping
The next step was to carefully cut and shape the wood pieces to form the structure of my box. Precision was key in this step to ensure a seamless fit. First I used the mitre saw to cut down the long planks of wood. I had to repeatedly cut one piece after the other as oppose to marking out where all my cuts would be and just cutting to prevent uneven cuts due to width of the saw blade. Next I routed the edge pieces of cut wood with 2 different route patterns as required for the intermediate level of this assignment. Finally I used the orbital sander with grit sizes of 60, 120 and 320 sequentially to smoothen my cut pieces.
Images showing progress images of cutting and shaping the wood in order
Step 3: Assembling the Pieces
With the individual components ready, I began assembling the box. Nails and different drill bits played a crucial role in ensuring the sturdiness of the structure. Here, I used a smaller drill bit first to loosen the wood area that I intend to put nails and then a bigger drill bit to take out some wood in the area where my nail head would be positioned to ensure that my nail is countersunk with the surface of the wood when eventually drilled in.
Image showing my assembly process
Now came the fun part – adding personal touches to make my box unique. I utilized the guidelines given to us on canvas for assembling the box but slightly modified the middle section of my box to be a little offset from the top and the bottom sections while ensuring the vertical supports where still aligned with surfaces of the middle section. Here as opposed to the four vertical supports being interior to the section, two were connected on the exterior surface on one end and two on the interior of the other end.
Final Assembly of the Box
Step 4: Applying the Finishing Touch
At this stage, I applied bees wax to the interior of my wood and a wood stain to the exterior. Unfortunately, my walnut wood stain did not come out as I would have liked it probably because I waited too long before wiping of the stain so I had to pivot after letting it dry for a day. I ended up re-sanding the exterior of my piece to take off some of the black stain and then spray painting my box purple and white. To be honest, I only added white because I ran out of purple spray paint which was probably a little bit of poor planning on my end. Finally, I applied a clear coat spray paint to my box to add some gloss to it. Yet after all this by box was still lacking the visual appeal I intended so I sanded my whole piece with 400 grit sand paper, covered the faces of the piece having colors that came out well with cardboard and then spray painted the whole box white to have a purple and white fully spray-painted box.
Images of the finishing process
Step 5: The art of “mis en place”
Throughout my making process, I was conscious of cleaning my work space as I proceeded to prevent having to clean up a whole lot of mess at once at the end of my work time. Some pictures I took after separate work days are shown below. Hopefully this section of my blog encourages you to not only google translate “mis en place” but to likewise incorporate it in your making journey.
Images taken after clean-ups
Cost Analysis of my Process~$160
I have listed estimate amounts of the materials I exhausted in creating this box assignment in the table below. Most of my unit costs were estimated from the average prices of what i saw on Amazon.com. Since the labor involved in this was not really as specialized as anything I would do in hard core mechanical engineering classes, I decided to compensate myself only $12/hour. Please note though, to whoever reading this, that I would most likely charge >$25/hour to create something similar for you just because I can 🙂
Creating my own box was a fulfilling and rewarding experience. From the initial planning stages to the final touches, every step allowed me to explore my creativity and showcase my personality (quite colorful as you can see). I hope this journey inspires you to embark on your own DIY project, whether it’s a box, a piece of furniture, or any other craft that ignites your passion.
