For the first day, I fixed my cut list because it did not take into account some parts of the future steps I had to take. Therefore, I only ripped the bottom, top, and sides of my future wooden box because I needed to have those parts in order to get the correct measurements for the front and backs part that will fit into the sides and settle on the bottom part. I used the table saw for this, which had to be adjusted in a way that let me cut my large pieces of wood horizontally instead of vertically. I planned on using the circular miter saw for this, but the saw could not cut my pieces since they were a tad too large. All, in all there were not many complications, however I still took over 2 hours to do all this work.
Day 3:
I continued assembling my chest on this day, and initially I was going to connect the parts with either screws or staples( That's what I thought I was going to do on Day 1, but by Day 2 I already knew and had started to do some pocket screwing), but instead it was determined that pocket screwing was the way to go because the pocket screws would go on the inside part of the chest so it would not be visible on the outside. This was not very hard to do for the the sides(finished on Day 2), but pocket screwing the front and back parts did get more challenging because assembling clamps on them was trickier and I had to move in weird constraining angles in order to inset the pocket screws with the drill. However, in order to fix that issue after putting the back part I decided to move the chest vertically so that it was sitting on one of the sides rather than on its bottom, and that way I could more easily and accurately insert the pocket screws for the front part. This all took about 2 hours.
Day 4:
This day I added the top lid, with a long piano hinge that ran along for most of the chest's width. Initially, I had a a smaller hinge that was less than half the size of the chest because I did not consider the fact that most chests have a hinge or hinges that run along most of the chest's width in order to provide the most support. Nevertheless, I put clamps on the top part of the hinge that was flush with the edge of the top lid and the back part, so that I could add the screws on the top part of the hinge then after that I did a similar process for the bottom part of of the hinge. After, I was done placing the hinge, I went on to work on the border for the chest. I was going use my scrap wood to make the border or just buy new pieces of wood, but Professor Tim mentioned that there were some problems with that idea. So instead I used a classmates scrap maple wood to make my border, but this was constraint because I had to depend on the dimensions that those pieces came in. However, I was able to make some adjustments ( I had to) that would allow me to place and arrange those pieces of maple wood in the best way possible. First, I ripped all the four necessary pieces, so that they would be of equal width since they were originally uneven.Two of the maple wood pieces ran all the way through on the front and back sides, and the other two pieces of maple wood for the side went inside the two pieces for the front and back sides. Next, I used the power miter saw to cut the pieces of maple wood into their correct lengths. After this I tried assembling the maple wood pieces. I encountered a lot of issues with this part because I had not thought it out too much. I thought I could just somehow screw them in, but that was not the case. First, I glued two pieces of maple wood to the front and back parts, but I still had to add some nails into them in order to make it more secure. Thus, I utilized a very thin twist drill bit to make a hole into the maple wood because it is very hard wood and just hammering in a nail would be difficult, but unfortunately I eventually broke the twist drill bit. Hence, I had to resort to just hammering in the nails into the maple, which did not go so well because I kept bending them. Therefore, I had to resort to using the pneumatic stapler to finish adding the nails to the two maple pieces in the front and back parts and then again for the two maple pieces on the sides( after gluing them in). This whole part took a lot longer than I expected. Finally, after this was done Professor Tim suggested that I add a lid hinge because without it, the piano hinge on the back could be put under a lot of strain and as a result break, so I will be doing this for Day 5. I spent over 3 hours working on all of this.
Day 5:
This was my final day working on my wooden chest, and all I had to do was add the lid hinge that I mentioned before. I had to strategically put the part of the hinge that connects to inside of the chest at a place where the lid hinge would not pop out when the lid was closed. So after finding the correct location to put the lid hinge that goes of the inside of the chest, I drilled a screw in. Then, for the part of the lid hinge that is attached to the lid, I clasped the extended hinge to the region that seemed favorable to me( how far back I wanted the lid to go), and screwed the bottom part then the same for the top part but with a different screw since I only had two of the same screws( I needed 3 screws in total). This took me about 1 hour. After that I was done with the project.
Final Thoughts and Evaluation:
Looking back at all the process I think I could have done a better job in planning out my final project because at a lot of points during the process I was unsure about what do next. I had rough ideas but not extremely concrete steps, and even some of my vague ideas were incorrect. For example, I had to adjust my cut list because I did not consider things I had to do before getting the accurate measurements for the front and back parts, and I forgot about making sure that the grains of the wood ran the right way( holding strength). Also, in the final project proposal I said that I would edge band after assembling, but that doesn't make sense because you need to edge band before assembling since edge banding does add a little bit more of width/ length. Moreover, I decided to make my chest roughly 30" in width, 14" inches in length, and 16" inches in height, but I should have made it bigger in order to maximize the 4X8 sheet of china birch plywood. Initially, I did not care since I thought the box was a good size, but it now seems to me rather wasteful that I did not take advantage of all the wood I had. I mean I did want to have remaining wood just in case I made dreadful mistakes and had to remake a part, but I would have still had more than enough wood for scraps if I made the chest larger. Additionally, I think I should have bought better wood like maple because at the end my chest was very scraped and had a lot of veneer coming off that's why when I did the edge banding some parts of the wood would chip off. The chest would have looked much nicer. All in all, I think I am at least content that the wooden chest came together(somewhat) because I was not very hopeful in my own abilities. I mean would have been slightly happy just making it without cutting my fingers off or some other persons fingers. Nevertheless, better planning, materials,and methods might have made the chest looked more smooth and put together, but it was still nice doing this project because I haven't done nothing like this before.
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