For our first ENGI 210 project, we were tasked with building a crate from scratch.

We started with a discussion about which type of crate we wanted to build, and we ultimately decided on just following the beginner crate tutorial because we both had very little experience with woodworking.

We then got to work cutting our wood down to size. We cut:

9 x 14.5” long pieces of 1x4s

6 x 12” long pieces of 1x4s 

4 x 10-11” long pieces of 2x2s

After that, we started joining the sides together using wood screws. When we were joining everything together, we ran into trouble with our wood cracking. We tried to minimize this as much as we could, but we still experienced some cracks in our wood.

Figure 1: We started by joining all the sides of the crate together

Figure 2: Joining the last pieces of the floor of the crate

After we built the sides of our crate, we routed a round pattern into our wood.

Figure 3: Routing the sides of our crate

When we finished routing, we sanded the crate down and drilled the pillars into the crate.

Figure 4: The crate completely put together

We then decided that we would give the crate a mahogany finish.