Geffen Playhouse Wine Crates

"Wow, are you kidding me. These are the nicest wine crates I have ever seen." - Felix Istrin

I was commissioned by the Geffen Playhouse to create some custom wine crates for their upcoming play Big Sky. I highly recommend you all check it out. Tickets and info here. They were made out of clear, kiln dried pine. "Clear" pine, refers to the fact that there are no knots or anomalies in the wood. "Kiln dried," as clear pine, costs more but is advantageous in that it is easier to work with and will not warp as much later when the wood dries up. It is also less likely to crack. The process of making the box was fairly straightforward. First I drafted the box to get all the dimensions.

After drafting it, came to cutting down all the wood to size. I wanted to use as large of pieces as I could for the sides. The sliding top is another issue I will address later. To get the sides in the thickness required I needed to plane them down to the proper thickness.

This creates quite the amount of sawdust. The picture above is only a fraction of the mess. For the top pieces, I wanted to mimic other wine crate tops. They use lots of small pieces that are glued together to create one solid piece. 

Once they were all glued up I had to cut out grooves on box and top to create a slide.

Then I routed out handles for the crate. Similar to this example.

After this came creating the interior...which I forgot to shoot. DAMN. So after a bit of routing, sanding and gluing there you have it. Two really strong, beautiful wine crates.