Custom Milk Crate Top

Parkit uses milkcrates for easy, portable storage. We designed these milk crate tops to function as lids for traveling. Follow this instructable to make a regular milk crate top and learn how you can customize it to become a chess board milk crate top, a milk crate top with an etched design on top, or a milk crate top with cupholders.

3/4" plywood

table saw

drill press + circle cutter

belt sander or sandpaper

wood finish

optional

laser cutter

The image above shows the design of the milk crate lid with a view of the bottom (rounded edges are not depicted in the rendering). A standard milk crate has exterior dimensions of 13" by 13" and interior dimensions of 12" by 12." The interior square has a height of 1/4" and the total top has a height of 3/4." (the total height will be determined by the thickness of plywood that you use)

Using a table saw cut your large piece of plywood into a 13" x 13" square. This is shown in image one.

Lower the saw so that it cuts through 0.25 inches of the plywood. Make four lengthwise cuts 0.5 inches in from the edge of the square. This is shown in image 2.

Now, with the square standing vertically, adjust the saw so that it cuts through 0.5 inches of the plywood. Cut off the four sides according to previous cuts. You can use a featherboard to hold the piece in place as you make your cuts. This step is depicted in the third image.

Using a belt saw, round the edges of your milkcrate top to a radius you deem aesthetically pleasing. Using a sanding block and and a medium grit sandpaper, we used 100 grit, sand the remaining edges so that they are smooth to the touch.

Now that you have a milk crate top, you can be finished with your project or choose to add embellishments.

This instructable will share how to make a milkcrate top with a chess board/checkers board, a milkcrate top with an etched design, or a milkcrate top with cupholders.

First, choose the cups you'd like to place in you milkcrate top. Parkit uses solo cups to hold drawing utensils like markers and crayons.

Measure the circumference of the cup at the depth that you want the cup to sit in the milk crate. The diameter we used was 3.2 inches and the radius was 1.6 inches. Using a pencil, split your milkcrate into four even squares and then draw diagonals to find the center of each quadrant. Draw a center point and a circle with the decided radius in each of the four quadrants.

Using a drill press with the circle cutter set to the desired radius, cut out each of the four circles. Make sure to sand the edges of the circles to remove any roughness.

An etched design on top of the milk crate can be added for aesthetics or function. Parkit adds designs that can be used as rubbing boards for drawings.

Using a software compatible with your lasercutter, create the design you want etched into the top of the milk crate lid. We used Adobe Illustrator to trace our logo and exported that into a .dwg file to be edited in Autocad.

Send the file to your laser cutter and monitor it as it etches your design onto your milkcrate top! We used an Epilog Lasercutter.

This process is identical to the previous just with a chess board design.

Download the attached CAD file and use a lasercutter to carve a chess board onto your milk crate top.

Now that your project is complete you can add a wood finish and stain to help ensure your top is weather resistant and aesthetically pleasing. We used this finish and this finish as well.