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Homemade Vintage Style Apple Crate

I have always had my eye on those Vintage Style Apple crates that are being sold online for quite a bit of money. With that in mind and my frugal nature, I decided to try and build one for myself. What follows is the first draft of this post that will be updated and added to when I get more time to add the remainder of the photos and possibly the tools required/used and anything else I have omitted on this first draft.

I had bits of an old pallet lying around after a previous project to build a reindeer wine bottle holder and decided to use that. The wood is pine and quite thick (2cm)for pallet wood, so quite good quality.

I started by cutting out:-

  • 3 lengths of the pallet wood for the base of the crate. These measured 50cm long x 9.5cm wide x 2cm depth.
  • 2 lengths of wood measuring 55cm long for the long sides of the crate.
  • 2 lengths of wood measuring 28cm long for the short sides of the crate where the hand holes will be cut.

Main Pieces of Wood for Crate
To cut the holes for the handles, I cut out a cardboard template (shown in place on the photo above) and copied it onto the wood and then used my scroll saw to cut out the hand holes. The photo below shows all of the hand holes cut in the short side pieces and all pieces sanded. The additional 4 small pieces of wood in the diagram below double for supports for the corners of the crate but also to allow for another crate to be stacked on top of this one without damaging the contents.

All Pieces Required To Build Crate
I screwed the 4 sides together to make the crate study and panel pinned the bottom of the crate to the sides. The 4 corner supports were put on last.

Here are a few photos of the "finished" product.




I was surfing the internet for some inspiration on decorating the crate and came across a website that showed how to use an inkjet printer to print on wood. Unfortunately I don't have the link on my tablet as I am writing this blog post and will add it here later to give credit to the author of this method. The basic method is to use freezer paper (not sure what this is) to print onto. This paper is shiny and the ink does not dry up and it can therefore be transferred onto wood. I did not have any of this, so hunted around the house and found an overhead projector slide and thought this might work, which it did.

To transfer the image onto the crate you should:

  • Get an image you want to print. If the image has text on it, you will have to flip the image in the program you are using to create a mirror image of the image otherwise when you transfer the image to the wood it will be back to front.
  • Put the overhead projector slide into the printer and print. Whilst the image is printing, carefully guide the slide out with your hands to prevent smudging of ink.
  • Carefully place the slide, wet ink side down on the side of the crate and smooth out entire image with the palm of your hand first and then I used the back of a spoon to go over everything again. Be sure to hold the slide n place without moving as this will cause smudging.
Below are a few photos of the crate with the image transferred onto it.



All the crate requires now is a coat of varnish or oil or something else to protect it. I haven't worked that out yet and if anybody can suggest anything suitable that they may have tried then please leave a comment to this post. 

Thanks


This post first appeared on Plough Your Own Furrow, please read the originial post: here

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Homemade Vintage Style Apple Crate

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