Hi Engineers!

This week I am going to give a glimpse into how I began my journey of woodworking but building my crate.

To start with building a box, Amit and I paired up for the project. We started by taking the pre-cut wood as we wanted to focus more on the post-processing of the wood. The idea was for the box to be 12″*16″, so we started assembling the three frames that were going to make the body of the box. Since the frames had a lot of uneven sections because of the countersink drill I decided to sand them after assembling the base frame. We sanded them with a 200 and then an 800. Once the frames were ready, we took three wooden planks to assemble the base of the box. Once we had the first frame attached to the three planks, we drilled in the four pillars to give our box a structure as we also wanted the other two frames to be leveled equally. While putting the topmost frame we were unable to put it through the pillars, and that’s when we had to disassemble and reassemble the frame. Even after doing that, there was a minute space between the two planks hence we had to recut a piece of wood and replace it with a previous one. After that, we had our box ready.

 

 

We finished it off by sanding it with a 2000 using the orbital sander. This made our box really smooth.

 

 

 

 

 

We stained our box with Danish oil( Dark Walnut) and ended it with the crystal-clear enamel spray. Thanks to Dr. Wettergreen for getting us more Danish oil when we were out of it!

 

After waiting for almost 12 hours, our crate was ready. It was really smooth and shiny.  One thing I could have done better was wiping off the dust properly before staining but I loved how it turned out in the end!

 

 

 

Cost Analysis:

Material	Cost	Quantity		Total Cost
6 Boards	$7.98			$     15.99
2 Planks	$3.48			$     2.00
Screws	$6.98			$     3.5
Sandpaper 2000	$4.98			$     2.50
Danish Oil Stain	$12.98	2 Pints		$     20.00
Enamel	$7.99			$     3.00
Engineer	$38	3 hours		$   114.00
Drill	$12.88			$12.88
Total				$173.87