Introduction

This past week Justin and I embarked on making a wooden crate, and I have to say I am pleased with the result. We both had a decent amount of woodworking experience before this project, but I had not used the router or stained wood so I was looking forward to learning some new skills.

Step 1: Routing and Sanding

Routing is one of the prime ways to make most woodworking projects look more professional, however, overdoing it can cause a piece to be discordant. So, before we started routing we planned out how each piece of wood (we got precut wood) would fit in our box design and which edges needed routing. We picked the ugliest pieces of wood to go near the bottom and angled all imperfections toward the center. After routing, we smoothed the surface and edges of each wood piece with an orbital sander at 120 grit.

<–Really smooth surfaces and edges

Step 2: Drilling 

I am particularly proud of the method we used to symmetric, consistent holes for the screws. Our original idea was to measure out the holes for each piece of wood and drill them individually. I didn’t like this idea because it would take too long and human error would cause the measurements to be off between pieces. Instead, I proposed we make one primary piece with all the necessary holes in the desired spots. We then put fresh piece under the primary one and used the hole to guide the drill pit to the correct position on the fresh board. We also used a vice to hold the pieces in place while drilling.

<– Bottom piece (no holes), top piece (hole-filled piece)

Step 3: Staining and Finishing

We opted to stain instead of spray paint because we were going for a rugged look. It’s also worth nothing that we stained and finished after drilling because we did not want to split the stained wood. As the left image shows, the stain completely changes transforms the wood. The right picture shows me using many… many paper towels (bottom right) to remove the stain. 

I stained the wood around 7pm on Wednesday, so we waited about half a day for the wood to dry to apply the finish Thursday morning. Wow, look how professional the finish makes the wood look! I honestly wanted to add it because I heard it would be a protective coat to the wood, but it also makes it look a lot better.

 

Step 4: Screwing  

The screwing in process was a bit more complicated than I initially thought it would be because of the spacing between the three wood piece sections. To tackle this problem, a wood piece was used as a spacer and held down by a clamp. Some minor, additional drilling had to be done on some pieces that are hidden and then the screws were driven through the wood to create our final product.

 

<–The Crown Jewel||Clean workspace–>

Cost Analysis

Mahogany Stain: $3.99

2×2 Wood: ~45in — $1.34 (Home Depot)

1×4 Wood: ~200in — $7.97 (Home Depot)

Matte Finish: $1.25 (Home Depot)

Labor: ($15 per hour for 5hrs) * 2 people

Total: $134.55