Fabrication

I made a crate with Kat!

We started with sanding all the precut wood. We used an orbital sander with 120 and 320 grit sandpaper.

After sanding, I marked the edges that needed to be routed and routed all the sides with the machine in the wood shop. It was a pretty repetitive process, and we were both excited to get into actually building the crate.

After routing the edges, Kat used the band saw to cut handles. I then hand-routed the edges of the handles to make them nicer to grasp, and we sanded the inside a little.

After sounding and routing, we moved to assemble the squares. Using a corner clamp, we drilled the pieces together to make three rectangles. For the bottom of the crate, the three pieces of wood couldn’t fit exactly into the rectangle, so we had to use an orbital sander to sand down some edges, but we got it to fit. After assembling the bottom, we started thinking about what kind of design we wanted.

We thought about hand-painting or doing some kind of splatter paint. Then, we went and looked at the spray paint options and noticed some pretty purples, so we decided to do kind of an ombre. We did dark purple for the base, lilac for the middle, and white for the top. To make the crate seem more cohesive, we also spray painted the pillars with gradual changes in color. When we first spray painted, it was kind of dark and windy so the paint wasn’t very even and we missed some spots. We had to go in the next day and apply another coat before sanding. After letting that coat dry, we then lightly sanded the surface and did a second (technically third) coat of paint.

Since it was so cold and the previous coats of paint dried pretty quickly, we thought we could started assembling the parts together 30 minutes after letting the paint dry. However, we were too eager. When we clamped to pieces down, we put paper in between the clamp and wood so that the clamp wouldn’t mess up the paint while we were drilling but the paper towels ended up sticking to the surface. We decided to just finish drilling the supports to the bottom layers because we already had paper towel bits stuck to it. After drilling the bottom, we sanded the paper towel bits off and then resprayed the bottom. After touching up the layers we decided to let it dry overnight and assemble the rest another day.

When we came back, we realized we had drilled the supports to the bottom without checking if the other two layers could fit around it. We ended up having to loosen the screws and adjust the supports to ensure all the frames could stack on top of each other. Once we got the frames positions correctly, we put slabs of wood in between the frames to ensure the gaps were uniform. I misplaced a 1/8″ drill bit, and we spent a while looking for it. I ended up using a 9/64″ bit for a while and progress was really slow. Then, we find the 1/8″ bit and all was good and progress sped up. We actually had to redo the middle because the frame was tilted and the gap was uneven. However, eventually we got it to work out and the box was finished! It looks pretty good if I say so myself.

Clean workspace