This is the smaller, standalone companion to the record-player media console built earlier this year: a mitered plywood crate sized to hold a stack of vinyl records upright, with the corners cut at 45 degrees and reinforced with glued-in wood splines rather than just butt-joined and screwed together. It’s built to be sold on its own, for anyone who wants somewhere for their records to live without taking on a full media console project.
Setting Up the Miters
The crate’s four corners are mitered rather than butt-joined, which means the table saw’s blade angle has to be exact before any panel gets cut. A digital angle gauge set against the blade confirms a true 45.0 degrees here. It’s worth checking directly rather than trusting the saw’s built-in angle scale, since even a small error compounds across four corners and shows up as a visible gap when the box comes together.
Gluing Up the Mitered Corners
Blue painter’s tape does double duty during glue-up: taping across a miter seam before folding it closed keeps the joint aligned and holds a hinge-like tension while the glue is still wet, and it keeps squeeze-out off the visible face of the plywood. Once the box was folded up into its final shape, corner clamps and bar clamps arranged in an X pattern held all four mitered joints square while the glue cured.
Reinforcing the Corners With Splines
A mitered joint alone is mostly glued end grain to end grain, which isn’t the strongest joint on its own, so each corner here gets a thin wood spline glued into a small slot cut across the miter, adding real long-grain glue surface and locking the joint mechanically. It’s a small extra step that meaningfully strengthens a box that’s going to get loaded with the actual weight of a record collection and picked up and moved.
Not every piece of spline stock survives the process. One thin strip split while being fit into place during this build, a reminder that thin stock this size needs to be handled carefully and that a spare strip or two is worth having on hand.
Cleaning Up the Joints
Once the splines and glue had cured, a wide chisel cleaned up the corners by hand, trimming any proud spline material and squaring up the joint line rather than relying on sanding alone to get a crisp edge. A Japanese pull saw and a length of edge-banding-style strip stock were also part of the corner-detail toolkit for this build.
Two Crates From This Build
The photos from this build actually show two crates: an all-birch version, and a second one finished with a lighter birch top paired with a noticeably darker, walnut-toned plywood body for some visual contrast. Both share the same mitered, spline-reinforced construction. The two-tone version is a nice option for anyone who wants the crate to stand out a bit more as a piece of furniture rather than disappear into the room.
The Finished Crate
Finished and sanded, the crate is sized to hold a stack of standard 12″ records upright, which is really the only dimension that matters for a piece like this. It’s shown here with one record set inside just to confirm the fit.
A Companion to the Record-Player Console
This crate was built alongside the larger mid-century record player stand with sound bar and vinyl storage, a full media console with a turntable shelf, a dedicated sound bar bay, and built-in record storage. This crate is the standalone answer for anyone who doesn’t need all of that: just a solid, well-built place to keep records, on its own. With U.S. vinyl revenue having crossed $1 billion in 2025 for the first time according to the RIAA, and DIY plans for exactly this kind of build already for sale on Etsy, a well-built record crate is a useful small project, and, in this case, one Jeremy is building to sell.
