I took on the crate building assignment for EDES 210 with my wonderful friend, Alessa! We got to work with a quick meeting to decide on what days we can meet and organized our ideas together. We were set to work on Thursday before class, and Friday after our classes. We were super optimistic about getting done with our crate fairly fast, maybe in around 6 hours. Spoilers, we ended up coming in on Saturday and Sunday as well. 

On Thursday, we got to work by collecting all of our pre-cut wood. We saw that some of our wood was longer than others, and some of the planks were not in the best shape. We decided to cut some new planks using the scraps in the woodshop. After we marked off and cut the planks with the miter saw, we moved on to leveling the wood with the planer. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After all the wood pieces were leveled, we went on to sanding every piece of wood we had with the palm sander at 200 grit. We decided we wanted a crate that would be indoors, so we wanted it to be as smooth as possible. There were hours of sanding that went into the smoothness we acquired. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We also wanted our crate to have handles, so we sketched out a handle design on two shorter wood pieces. We then tried to cut out the sketch using the bandsaw. However, it was hard to cut out the curved corners of our design on the bandsaw. We did our best to cut out the sketch as much as we could with the bandsaw by cutting vertical lines down the sketch to help the wood separate with more ease. We ended up calling it a day for Thursday after we had all the wood leveled and sanded, and decided to tackle the handles another day.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Friday, we started by trying to fix up the handles. We tried recutting with the bandsaw, and even tried to use a chisel and hammer to cut out the design. Nothing seemed to be working, so we moved on to starting our assembly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We had separated our wood pieces based on the defects on Thursday, putting the more defected pieces on the lower parts of our crate and the prettier pieces on the upper layers. Alessa and I split up the two bottom layers and got to work with assembling them. We used the drilling method we learned in class to use a bigger drill bit after having our screw hole to have our screws sit flush on our wood. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once we had the two layers done, and screwed in the bottom three wood panels in, we ended up calling it a day once again. This was not according to plan, but since the work was taking much longer than expected and we already had previous plans on Friday we ended up needing to make time to meet again on Saturday. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Saturday, we had a huge revelation to use the scroll saw inside of the OEDK to fix our handle cuts. At this point, our handles had gone through a lot, and definitely needed to be sketched again. We wanted to have our handles be as symmetrical as possible, so we pulled out the rulers and protractor. We marked our wood in the middle horizontally and counted 2.5 inches on both sides of the middle. We then used the protractor to draw a straight 140 degree angled line from the end of our top line to the bottom of the wood. We moved on to cutting out the new and improved handle designs with the scroll saw. After cutting out the handles, we used dremels to smooth out the curves on the handles. And we finally assembled the top most layer of our crate.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We wanted to have as clean of a finish as possible for our crate, so we left the routing to the very end. We wanted each corner to seamlessly move onto the next. So we routed our wood layer by layer. We started with routing the upper side of the bottom most piece. Then we routed both sides of the middle piece. We also wanted to route the edges, but this could be dangerous since the router can hit our screws. So we ended up just sanding the sides to be seamless instead. After routing, we went back to sanding and made sure there were no defects or wood poking out. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once we were back inside from sanding the routed layers, we started to assemble our crate. We put up the four pillars around our bottom layer and started to drill the bottom layer with all the pillars. We marked each layer at 4 inches from the top and 3.5 inches from the edge, so we could have consistent screws across our crate. We assembled the crate using rubber clamp covers to separate each layer. At this point, we were nearly done! That is until we found some 320 grit sandpaper. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With our new discovery, we had to go back to sanding our crate. We sanded every side and corner we could get our hands into. This was very difficult since our crate was already assembled, but we still ended up getting that smooth finish that we were looking for. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once our crate was as smooth as can be, we started discussing stains and finishes. We had agreed that I would keep the crate, and since my room mainly has lighter wood colors, we wanted to keep to the natural color of our crate and not make it too dark. We experimented with some stains we found around the OEDK as well as some beeswax we found. We ended up choosing the beeswax, and decided we would come back to the OEDK to finish up on Sunday. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On our final day, we came in with only one objective. We took our crate, grabbed some cloth and the beeswax and headed outside. We spent around 30 minutes coating our entire crate with beeswax, making sure we got into every corner and crevice. Once we were done, we left our box to dry, and we were all done! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here it is, our beautiful crate:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We used a lot of spaces around the OEDK for this assignment, and we made sure to leave all of our workspace clean. We put up all the tools and materials we used back where we got them from and vacuumed all the wood bits left from our work. Here are pictures from our clean work spaces after we were done working:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To break down the finances, Alessa and I worked on this crate for nearly 10 hours over 4 days. We learned the basics of woodworking during class and put in our best effort to make our crate as neat as possible, so I would pay us at least $15 and hour for our labor. I won’t be including a cost summary for the machines this time since that would be extreme with the cost of wood working machines. Additionally, it would not be realistic for me to have these machines and tools of my own. With that, here is an estimate of the total cost for this assignment:

Time: $300

10 hours for 2 people→ $15/hour

Materials: $33

2 1×4 planks → $17

1 2×2 plank → $3

48 screws → $3

1 bottle of beeswax → $10

Total: $333