Hey Adrian!
Alt-S worked fine, it was the e to extrude and then left clicking that didn’t seem to work at all. Only right clicking did the trick. That said, trying it just now on a default cube worked with the extrude and left click… so I don’t know what the heck was going on last night when I was doing it on the crate and it just wouldn’t work.
Probably something easily explainable by someone with more Blender knowledge/experience than I!