Eco-Friendly Casket Building Plans | Full-Scale Pattern | Digital Download

🎉 Page 97 Promo — Ends Sept 8, 2026: Buy this plan + the Socrates Casket plan together and get 50% off both. Use code PAGE97BOGO at checkout with both plans in your cart.

Build a casket with no metal, no glue, and no shortcuts — just wood returning to the earth.

The Story Behind This Design

This casket wasn't designed to be different for the sake of being different. It was built to answer a real request: a family who wanted their son prepared for burial the traditional way — blessed, and returned to the earth with nothing standing in the way of that.

That meant real constraints. No metal. No glue. No animal-based products, so standard wood glue was off the table. No nylon rope. Every material had to be something the earth could take back.

Those rules became the design brief for the Eco-Friendly Casket — Mark Zeabin's thesis on the craft after 25+ years of coffinbuilding. It's the most refined, most honest version of a casket he's built: solid wood only, sliding dovetail joinery instead of fasteners, and doweled handles instead of screws.

Watch It Come Together

Full assembly, start to finish — free to watch, included with every plan.

What Makes This Design Different

🌲 Zero Metal, Zero Glue Every joint is mechanical — sliding dovetails and doweled joinery hold this casket together. Nothing to rust, nothing synthetic, nothing left behind underground.

🪵 Solid Wood, No Plywood The base uses end dovetailing with a sliding dovetail to catch the bottom — engineered specifically to keep the base from bowing while being carried.

🤝 Doweled Handles No screws, no metal hardware. Handles are secured with a 1" dowel through the base, locked in place with a smaller cross-dowel — simple, strong, and entirely natural.

📐 Full-Scale Curved Pattern Included This plan includes a full-scale printable pattern for the curved components — trace or transfer it directly, no scaling math required.

What's Included

• Full-scale curved pattern sheets — print and use directly as your cutting template

• Joinery detail — sliding dovetail base construction and compound mitre dovetail lid joinery

• Handle attachment method — the dowel-in-dowel technique developed specifically to avoid metal fasteners

• Material guidance — built entirely from natural, biodegradable materials

Why Build It Yourself

There's a reason this design exists at all: because sometimes the most respectful thing you can do is prepare it yourself, with your own hands, using only what the earth can take back. Building this casket is as much a part of the process as anything else — a way of being present for a goodbye instead of outsourcing it.

From the Shop That's Been Doing This Since 1997

MHP Enterprises has hand-built caskets, coffins, and urns for over 25 years. The Eco-Friendly Casket represents the most stripped-down, purposeful version of that craft — no plywood, no metal, no compromise. This is one of over 20 blueprint designs available for caskets and urns, for people and pets, each one built and proven in our own shop first.

📥 Instant Digital Download

Get the full-scale pattern and construction details, and build something real.

Follow the craft: @casketplans