Excellent comments Mark. I don't have a specific use or plan for this. I was getting tired of moving around this pile of maple strips left over from guitar making and just figured this was a good use for some of them. I still have a pile, maybe not enough for a box this big but maybe a shallower box. The open weave of the sides makes it a good candidate for anything that needs a little air circulation. My wife says she has a use for it so it's hers now. It's outside dimensions are 17" x 11" x 10" deep. I would make a good potato box.
The dowel pins in the top frame do indeed go straight down into the corner posts, about an inch or so. And you are correct, that probably isn't the most structurally secure way to do that. I didn't think about angling them. Because I cut the slots for the maple slats about 1/4" deep into two sides of the posts, and the posts are roughly 1" square, I only had about a 5/8" square area of post of drill into (see the photo below). I tried to center my dowel pin into that area. I did use Titebond, both between the top frame and post and in the dowel hole and in the mortise & tenon joints. I don't think it'll come apart but it could. I guess ideally it would be better to have the top frame tenon go into the corner post and then dowel pin it through. I did not pin the maple slats, they're just sitting in the saw kerfs in the corner posts. The vertical maple slats are glued and nailed into the plywood bottom (covered by the cherry trim), but just sit in routed dados in the top frame. There's probably methods for making these types of boxes but I didn't bother researching it - just winged it, trying to use some of the "scraps" I had in the garage. The cherry was leftover from a coat rack thing I built several years ago and it had twisted and warped a little so I could only use it for shorter projects. The juniper was rough sawn from a place up near Terrebonne and I had used it for some key racks, etc.. It was a little over 1" thick so I figured it would make good corner posts. Nothing more scientific than that went into this box, heh heh.
Edit: The other weak link is where the corner posts attach to the plywood bottom. I chiseled out a 5/8" deep pocket in the bottom of each corner, so the plywood bottom would recess into that pocket. Then I glued and nailed the corner posts to the plywood bottom. You can kind of see how I did that in this photo. I'm sure there are better ways of doing this part too.
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