One day, after making my Jenga Pistol, I told Sandy, “Oh, check this out, I know how to work with wood now,” and she said, “You know how to work with wood, huh? Well, Aaron was supposed to make me a fancy wooden box to hold my yarn, but he never seems to get around to it, so could you make it for me?” And I said, “Sure! Anything for you Sandy. I mean, how hard could it be? It’s just a box.”
I started designing it, that freshman summer, but Aaron talked me into making finger joints for the sides of the box, and I got stuck trying to making those in SolidWorks and just put the project on hold for a while, thinking, “Aaron knows how to do it, I’m sure he’ll come up with a way to do it…”
Sophomore year came around and at the time, I was trying to double major with Mechanical Engineering and Mathematics, so the first semester took 5 classes. This was one of the hardest times of my life. I worked really hard, I was expected to know a lot more than I did, and no matter how hard I worked, my grades did not seem to improve. I certainly didn’t have time to make a wooden box. Then IAP came around and I was busy taking several classes: 2.670 (Intro to Machine Tools), 6.094 (Intro to MATLAB), and UPOP (Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program), all the while, I was making my electric guitar. I barely had enough time for that, much less for a wooden box. The second semester came around and I was busy with 2.007 and other projects (RoboCup, using the laser cutter, etc.), so I didn’t make it then either. At this point, I was often so ashamed that I would avoid coming to the MITES office. I was afraid that she would ask me for a yarn box and I would stand there, empty-handed. I felt bad that I said I would do something and I didn’t do it; that simply isn’t who I am. I keep my promises.
Junior year rolls around and basically the same thing happened: the first semester I was hosed with p-sets, IAP I was busy with a project (NHPLS), and the second semester I was busy with projects (UROP, 2.671, etc.), so I didn’t get it done again. What was different about junior year was that Sandy passed on the project to my friend Caesar. He bought some wood online (a terrible idea, see my entry on woodworking), and he started jointing and planing the wood. I never saw his design, I just assumed he would get it done sooner or later, and I’d see the finished product. Now I felt guilt-free about not working on it, and I came by the office to chitchat and go do other awesome things.
Then, unfortunately, my friend Caesar decided to leave MIT for health reasons. Not only were many people and I sad to see him leave, but also there was the relatively minor issue of the box not being made. He left the wood behind though, so I set out to finish making this box once and for all. I added it to my project queue after v2 of the party lighting system.
After working on NHPLS v2, I was in a hardcore design mode: perfecting CAD models, finding the cheapest appropriate parts, FEA, etc. So I came up with a design for Sandy’s box. The first design was dead simple: four wooden walls that were ½” thick, held together by mitre joints, a base that was held in place by a slot in the walls, and a top that slid into a slot. Simple. Too simple, perhaps? I was not pleased with the design. It certainly did not look like it was worth a two-year wait. Then I decided to make it a little more interesting by milling out slots in the walls that were about 4” by 6”, then screw in acrylic panels so that photos can be held in them. This really livened up the design while keeping the machining fairly simple, so I set out to work on it. I mean, the wood that Caesar got has to work with the design I have right? Wrong! I didn’t consider the fact that the wood might not work until it was too late. I measured the wood that was left behind and there was no way that I could make my design out of the wood that was given to me. There was basically one thick (about 1” thick) piece of wood and a bunch of thin (about ½” thick) pieces of wood. The design calls for ½” thick pieces of wood, but in the time since Caesar worked on it, the wood was warped and bent out of shape, requiring that the pieces needed to be jointed and planed down to even thinner pieces, which was not desirable since ½” was kind of thin for a box of this size (12”x18”x18”). There were two ways to deal with this: change the design to work with the wood I have, or buy more wood. I didn’t want to buy more wood, so I decided to change the design, again.
Since I had one thick piece of wood and a bunch of thin pieces of wood, I thought that it might be fitting to use the thick piece to make a frame of a box, and then I could make the walls out of thin panels. I decided to keep the frame such that I could hold four 4”x6” photos on each wall, and I made the frame as such. Then, I changed the top so that it was basically a picture frame design, holding a piece of wood that was laser engraved with the words, “Sandy’s Yarn Box.” Then, with the measurements on hand, I did some calculations to see if I had enough wood to make this design possible. As it turns out, I didn’t have enough wood. So, the obvious solution is to buy more wood, but another option is to change the design to not need to buy any more wood (or at least minimize the amount of wood needed to buy).
So I decided to write a MATLAB script to optimize the design. The script basically took some critical dimensions and calculates how much wood I need to get and how much it will cost. After playing around with some numbers I found that by using keeping the design with an 18” width would cost about $60, and using a 15” width would cost about $15, so I decided to alter the design to have a 15” width. If I made it any smaller, then I couldn’t use the box to hold photos and the beams for the cross bracing would be too weak, so 15” was a nice compromise between price and structural integrity.
Making the box took way longer than I expected. There’s a lot that goes into woodworking that I didn’t anticipate. I set aside two weeks to work on it, but it ended up taking about a month. The box looked really nice though, especially with the pictures. Sandy was pleased with it as well.
This was the first project that I ever questioned whether it was worth it to make. I learned the value of my time. Sure, Sandy was appreciative and the project turned out great, but was it really worth it? I worked on it for a month, and as such I basically missed out on a month’s salary from my UROP. That put a huge dent in my wallet. Working on these fun projects is great, but I can’t lose track of my priorities. There’s school, research, jobs, friends, family… I shouldn’t have to sacrifice them for a product, no matter what machining experience I get or how cool people think it is. Ultimately, I made an awesome product, learned a lot about woodworking, and I learned about the value of my time. I’d say it was definitely worth it.