Overview

Our first thought for crummy wood was old shipping pallets. Nowadays, most companies that ship things on pallets reuse them. The pallets are well marked, and picked up when the next truck makes a delivery. We found some broken pallets at Home Depot that were not marked with a vendor name, but the manager said that they had to be destroyed for liability reasons.

We ended up making what is probably the most expensive beat up old shipping crate on the planet. We did this by taking nice new plywood sheeting, ripping it into planks, and fastening them together.

A rectangular solid has 6 surfaces. For purposes of discussion, we will call them:

• top - also known as the "lid"
• bottom
• front
• back
• left side - door side
• right side - solid side

We also had a nice plan to make all the sides out of a single 4'x8' sheet of plywood, But at the last minute we made a change that used significantly more wood.

Original plan to make all the sides from a single sheet of plywood.

We suggest that you do it this way - not the way we did it.

Panels

Here, the nice, big piece of fine plywood gets ripped up.

You end up with a pile of slats.

The slats are jumbled up, so they look like they came from different pieces of wood.

Make sure they look pretty good together before permanent attachment.

Small gaps between the planks are good - the let fog and light leak out.

Here is a collection of slats, glued and screwed to the 1x3" top and bottom.

Some more 1x3" wood pieces strengthen the panel and make it look better.

Here's the back side, showing the numerous screws.

Doors

The panel was made in a single unit, and then cut after everything else had been fit together.

In order to minimize the gap between the side panel doors and the rest of the crate, David used his router to mortice the hinges into the frame.

Lid

As usual, we used glue and screws. This photo shows some clamps used to hold everything in position while driving the screws.

Completed lid.

Here's the back side, showing the numerous screws.

The lid is attached to the crate on the back edge using two metal hinges.

The smallest hinges that looked strong enough to use were still too large for the mounting location.

We bent them to fit, using a hammer and vise. Then we cut them to fit with a hacksaw, and dressed them with a file.

The hinge will fit like this.

The hinges are attached with heavy screws.

Bottom

We cut a hole in the bottom to facilitate passage of power and air lines.

Final Unfinished Exterior

David checks out the lid of the crate.

Dennis tries on the crate for size.

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