This story begins with me finding the pre-cut wood on the ENGI 210 table. Here is a terrible photo of the pieces of wood I chose. My first course of action was to use the rotary sander on all the pieces. I started with the 100-grit paper and then the 120-grit paper. This took a pretty long time when it didn’t have to. I think I was thinking too hard about it. I also want to note here that there were some unique features in my wood, such as crakes, holes, and weird manufacturing things, that would give my box *character* (pictured)! I did my best to work with them by using wood glue and sawdust to fill them in or sanding them smooth, but some results were more successful than others (and that’s ok).
DAY 2:
My next point was to assemble the frame of the boxes (the walls). I attached the corners with the corner grip, and began drilling. During this time, my biggest challenge was the countersink-screws. Every time I did them, they would split my wood, casing chunks to tear off. I consulted another ENGI 210 person, and they suggested doing pulses when doing them. This definitely helped make them less frequent, but not by much. Here you can see me taking photos of the countersink-screws; these were the better ones, but you can see how the wood would split. I continued this process until I had three frames.
I THEM REALIZED THAT I MADE THEM WRONG. I thought I double-checked how I was attaching them, but I apparently didn’t do it well enough (hence my thumbs down photo). So I disassembled everything and started over again. One future issue this caused was filling the old holes. In the second photo below, you can see the difference. The top frame is how I originally made them, and the bottom is how they are supposed to be attached. At this time (12:00 AM), I was considering just cutting the bottom slates to retrofit my mistake, however the dimensions of the top frame (14.5×12.5×12) would not fit the dimensions requirement for the project (16x12x12). When reattaching the wooden pieces, there was one piece that had this hole, so I had to do my screws closer together. by 1:00 AM, I was able to finish all three frames (correctly attached). Here is also a selfie of me working on it that I sent to my friend that was at the beach.
The following day, I was set on routing the edges. I quickly sanded my pieces once again, and asked the Lab Tech to help me out with changing the router bit. The Lab Tech didn’t know how to use the routing machine, so we both tried to do it together. We ended up just keeping the bit that was already on the machine, just so it was easier for both of us. I tested it with a scrap piece of wood and thought it looked fine. I routed the vertical wood pieces for my crate and the edges of the rectangluar frames. I then went outside to smooth out the edges with a rotary-sander.
After sanding, I went to assembling the bottom. I tried to space them out as evenly as possible. Once I screwed them in (with countersink-screws). They turned out a little uneven in spacing, because it was hard to figure out a way to grip them to the frame, but I still liked how it turned out. I then screwed the vertical pieces in. With those attached, I used scrap wood to test out the spacing of the rectangular frames. I liked them and got to attaching. I really enjoyed gripping them. I tried to make sure that the vertical pieces were flush with the frame pieces that I was drilling them into. I then did some sanding to smooth things out before staining. I chose the walnut stain, and stained the entire crate. Attached is the BeReal that I took for my crate (everyone in the comments really liked it). The last photo is my cleaned area.
I spent about 12 hours working on this crate. If I were paid $8/hour, a little over minimum wage in Texas (currently $7.25), the labor cost would be $96. I used about 17 ft (to be exact, 16.875 ft) pieces of 1×4 lumber, and 3.5 ft of 2×2 lumber. 1×4 lumber is about $0.415/ft, which amounts to $7; 2×2 lumber is about $3/ft, which amounts to $4.5; equalling $11.5 total for wooden materials used (Home Depot Website). A pack of screws is about $10, however because I did not use a whole pack and they are shared from the OEDK, I will calculate the cost being $1.5 for the screws. The woodstain pan is about $13 for the entire thing–I obviously didn’t use the entire can so I will cut that to about $1.5 of use. Therefore, the overall costs of my crate would be $107.5. This would be a little over the bare minimum, as I calculated it with Texas minimum wage.
Overall happy with the results, and happy to use the machines!
