Image 1: Crate Drawing and Design

Image 2: Stock Wood Marked to Cut

Once we had an idea of what we were going to do, we started preparing our crate materials. We opted to not have our wood pre-cut, so we started off by marking the lengths of pieces we would need and using the miter saw to cut them.

Once we had our cut pieces of wood, we sanded each one with 60 grit sandpaper and a 120 grit electric sander so that we could safely work with them and there were no super rough edges in our final product. We knew we would sand the box at the end, but we wanted to sand each piece at the start in case there were edges we couldn’t reach in the final product. We also used the belt and disc sander for a few that needed to be slightly shorter.

Image 3: Carlisa Sanding Wood

Image 4: Table Router Work

After that, we routed the pieces based on our plan. We didn’t want to route all edges, but we wanted the sides of the crate to have a few round edges. We opted to use the table router as it was easier and we only needed to route straight edges. The last thing we did to prepare our wood pieces was cut out handles for our crate. We chose two pieces that would be the handles, and used a jigsaw and the circular sanding tool in the woodshop to cut it out and smooth it down. We chose to cut out heart shaped handles as it made our crate more aesthetic. Finally, our wood was ready to be put together.

Image 5: Creating Frames

We worked both at the inside table and on the loading dock to construct our crate. Our first step in constructing the crate was making three frame shapes out of 1×4 pieces that would become the sides of our crate. For these, we used the corner clamps to keep the wood in place, and screwed it together with wood screws. We used two different drill bits to make pilot holes and then countersunk holes for the screws. We had some issues with these bits where we had wood chipping off of the sides of our holes, which left some holes in our final crate. This was frustrating, but we didn’t have a way to repair the wood, so we had to leave them be. We repeated this process for all four corners of each frame, and ended up with three frames.

After we made our three frames, we put the floor of the crate in and screwed that in as well. We fit the three pieces into the bottom frame and screwed them in from the sides. This was also frustrating to do as the bottom frame and floor pieces didn’t line up to make a smooth bottom for our crate. The three floor pieces were fairly even, but the bottom frame was slightly above them. We decided to try to tackle this issue during the final stages of making our crate rather than redo the floor. After that, we put our four 2×2 pieces in the crate and attached them to the bottom. We started stacking the frame pieces and screwing each one into the four vertical 2x2s, using the same method as before with a pilot hole and countersunk hole.

Image 6: Stacking Frames

Once we screwed all three frames onto the base structure, our crate construction was done. I was happy with our final crate structure. It is quite sturdy and easy to carry or use to hold items.

Now that our crate was reconstructed, we moved onto some post processing techniques. First, we sanded the whole crate. We used an electric sander with 60 and 120 grit for the sides of the crate, and used sandpaper for the inside and small edges the electric sander couldn’t get to. This was the stage where we put in a lot of work to get rid of the small imperfections that came with constructing the crate. We sanded off any wood chips from the screws and did our best to smooth down uneven edges. This was also useful to prep the wood for any staining or spray paint we wanted to do to our crate.