The Box PROCESS

For this assignment my partner was Emily Pena. We decided to create the beginner box however in order to gain some skill and experience we decided to cut out our own wood as taught in class. We followed the steps given in the assignment document. This steps included Our process for this box included cutting, preprocessing, assembling, post-processing, and final staining+touches.

First we sanded all of the wood to get rid of the blemishes, warps, cracks, and other unpleasant features. This provided a smoother surface which helped us to flush the wood together better when clamping and screwing the pieces together as seen below.

We clamped the pieces together in order to allow us to mark, create pilot holes, countersink, and add in our screws.

This step was repeated until we had three similar box frames which would serve as the body of our box. We also routed our wood pieces to provide our box with a better look and feel. A style choice we made was to route the top and leave the bottom as is this reduced routing time but also in our eyes added to the look of our box.

Picture of my partner loving the routing experience 🙂

After routing and assembling the three square frame pieces we add three wooden planks to the bottom square frame to serve as the base of our box and we screwed those in as well. Once we had our base we were able to add our 2×2 corner support pieces to the inside of our box. Once everything was marked measured and aligned we screwed our 2×2 to our box and created slats with scrap wood and rulers. 😅

Screwing 2×2 and creating slats.

One issue we had which we were able to fix was splintering the wood at times due to over countersinking near the edge of our wood. This didn’t happen every time but some areas of our box did kind of splinter. We were able to fix this however with sanding, filling the holes and splinters with a mix of sawdust and wood glue, and then sanding some more once everything dried.

 

Fixing the holes and splinters with our wood glue/sawdust mixture

After the physical completion of our box we had to finish the box and make everything look appealing. We sanded down the box so that the oil we chose to use would stick better and them after we coated it we use a light sand paper to even everything out around the box and then added a bit more oil to make sure the color was even throughout the entire box.

             

Safety first !!  Sand before applying and then began applying using a paint brush , after brushing sanded again and then did final touch up

After all of that we were finally done and very proud of everything we did to create our GR8 Crate !!

STRENGTHS

Some of our strengths I would like to mention are how flushed the wood was throughout the entire box, how well we sanded and how smooth the wood felt, and the color we choose to finish with. All three of these things I was really proud of and can see through our team effort we we able to create a pretty good looking box that paid attention to detail down to the look and feel of the box.

In this image you can see how flushed the wood is, how smooth it looks, and the color difference from the original wood color to the finished wood color

POINTS OF IMPROVEMENT

Overall I feel like we did a really good job on this project. Because we’re not perfect I am going to mention one way we could’ve improved however these things might be very little and I don’t think they would make too much of a difference. The thing I would improve is the process that we used to create equally spaced slats in our box. We used spare wood parts to create the slats originally however, when spaced out it wasn’t exactly flushed with the 2×2 pieces in the inside. Our solution was to place rulers on top of the spare wood to account for the space needed to be flushed. This worked out but wasn’t the most efficient.

Depicts our unorthodox method of creating space for slats in our box.

WHAT I LIKED ABOUT THIS PROJECT

I liked that this project taught me some woodworking skills and techniques and allowed me to apply them in a group setting to create a physical product. Overall I was happy with the final result of the product and could see myself using some if not all of these skills again in the future. I enjoy the process of getting “down and dirty” and don’t mind putting in the physical work especially when it pays off and results in a product that looks amazing.

WHAT I WOULD DO DIFFERENTLY

Given the choice the very first thing I would do differently is get better pieces of wood with less defects. This would be way easier to work with and result in a much cleaner and nicer look to the box overall. Since this wasn’t the case one thing I would do differently is probably cut the part that wasn’t flushed on our 2×2 pieces with a bandsaw instead of adding rulers to the spare wood when we created slats. This would’ve been faster, more effective, and allowed us to be more accurate in our spacing measurements.

COST ANALYSIS/BREAKDOWN

9 x 14.5” long pieces of 1×4 lumber | $4.35 (Lowes cost $3.48 for 8ft. we needed 10.875 ft.)

6 x 12” long pieces of 1×4 lumber | $2.61 (Lowes cost $3.48 for 8ft. we needed 6 ft.)

4 x 10-11” long pieces of 2×2 lumber | $1.40 (Lowes cost $3.48 for 8ft. we needed 3.5 ft.)

Danish oil: 0.1* $12.98 for 0.57 liter = $1.29

Screws: 48 * $5.50 for 100 screws  = $2.64

Labor: $18 hr x 9hrs = $162

Facility cost:

$4/hr x 2 hrs (orbital sander) = $8

$ 4/hr x 2 hrs (Drill) = $8

Total: $190.29