Iñigo’s and Kyle’s $700 crate | ENGI 210: Prototyping and Fabrication

In order to build a crate I teamed up with Kyle Li, and as we had both had some previous experience working with wood we chose the intermediate level for the assignment.

To start building our crate, we cut all of the necessary wood. We chose to do this instead of asking the TAs for it in order to familiarize ourselves with the different saws at the OEDK, and we managed to do really precise cuts getting high quality pieces of wood.

Once we had all the wood we needed, we started assembling the different layers of the crate. We did this following the techniques that we learned in class of using a drill and screws. We tried to be as precise as possible here, but it was really hard to make it perfect (both aligning the pieces and placing the screws symmetrically). Still, we were happy with the results. There was only one major issue in this step, as one of the screws jammed creating a crack in the wood, so the only thing we could do was try to sand it to hide it as much as possible. While we were doing this step, we realized that we would like to have a handle in our crate, so we proceeded to cut it using the band saw. Once we had done this we used the sable sander to make it as even as possible, achieving a satisfactory result (acknowledging that we would have to sand it again later in the process).

After doing this, we decided on the different routing patterns that we wanted for our crate. As we were doing the intermediate level, we needed at least too, so we decided that the horizontal edges would have one pattern, and the vertical ones another. To do this, we used the table router. We first did the horizontal edges using a rounded pattern with a line at the top, to achieve an elegant style. For the vertical edges we chose an inverted routing pattern to make contrast with the horizontal edges. Lastly, for the inner vertical pieces that were meant to connect the different layers, we went back to the first routing pattern, but avoided the top line to make it more discrete.

Once all of this was done it was time to start sanding. This was by far the step that took the longest, as we wanted to achieve the smoothest surface possible. We started using the electric hand sanders to cover all of the crate, and then sanded finer details using the sanding paper (such as the handle, and the wood around the screws). The main issues we encountered in this step were that the wood had many more flaws than we initially thought, which made us spend a really long time trying to achieve the best possible texture.

With the sanded pieces of the crate, we decided to stain them before finally putting everything together, in order to achieve a more uniform finish. The staining we chose was a white one, which we were aware would not change the colour of the wood and maybe would be less noticeable than other stains, but we believed that it would give the elegant character that we were looking for in our crate.

After letting the stain dry for around 2 hours, we assembled all the layers together as explained in the instructions. Finally, we sanded a few last details including the areas around the screws and some loose ends that we saw, and our crate was ready.