Introducing the Maker Almanac

A working catalog of bench reference data, kept by hand at the Mountain Maryland bench.

I used to keep a list above the bench. Tape, marker, half-illegible. Drill sizes for the taps I use most. The voltage drop on a 12-foot run of 14-gauge wire. The two resistor color codes I can never remember because my eyes argue with me about whether that band is red or orange.

The list grows. The list also disappears, taken down for paint, lost behind a cabinet, written over when a project ends.

This is the universal experience of working with your hands. The reference you need is never in your hand. It is in a book on a different shelf. It is in a PDF on a laptop that died. It is in a forum post from 2009. It is on a poster you owned and then somebody borrowed and then forgot, and now you are paying for premium printable charts from a website that pops up six modals before it lets you see the chart.

So I made my own.

Maker Almanac is Field Instrument 007 in my ongoing series of small handmade tools. It is a single HTML file. You open it in any browser. It runs entirely offline once loaded. There are no logins. There are no ads. Nothing phones home. It does not know who you are. It will not remember what you searched for. It is a catalog, not a service.

What is in it:

Fifty-six sections across four categories. Electrical and electronics. Mechanical. Software. Shop and studio. Resistor color bands. SMD codes. Tap and drill charts in metric and imperial. Sheet metal bend allowance. Spring design. Beam deflection. Geometry solvers. Pyrometric cones for kiln work. Tannage references for leatherwork. Yarn count converters for weaving. Signature math for bookbinding. Adhesive selection. Finish selection. Composite layup. Jig design. Shop safety with noise exposure math. Photography exposure triangle. Videography codec reference. Audio recording fundamentals. Hardness conversions. Welding heat input. Pressure vessel hoop stress. Saddle stitch thread length. Pulley and belt calculations. Hardware sizing.

It is the closest thing I have ever made to that taped-up list above the bench. The difference is that it does not disappear behind the cabinet, and that I get to share it.

There is a philosophy underneath this thing that I want to name. Same one as MILEPOST (FI 003): the tool should get out of the way. The Maker Almanac does not nudge you. It does not have streaks. There is no leaderboard for how many laser cuts you ran this week. The page you do not need is not on screen. The page you do need is one keystroke away. Command-K, type three letters, hit return. It is the same gesture as flipping to a tabbed page in a real almanac, except it never sticks together because you got finish on your fingers last Tuesday.

I built it for me. I am putting it on the web because if it is worth building, it is worth sharing. Same principle that runs everything I make. The only ethical place to keep a reference like this is in public, where anyone who is going to start a bench tomorrow can find it.

A few specifics worth mentioning. The unit conversions are reversible everywhere. You can punch in 4.7k and get yellow, violet, red, gold, or you can pick the bands and read out the value. Same for the yarn count converter, same for the paper weight converter that bridges GSM and the strange American “100 lb cover” basis-weight system that nobody can ever remember. Calculators show their work, not just their answers, because if you cannot see the formula you cannot tell when the answer is wrong.

The whole thing is one HTML file. About 800 kilobytes. Fits on a thumb drive ten thousand times over. It will keep running in 2040 if browsers still load HTML, which I expect they will, because HTML is older than most of the software I have ever paid for and it is still here.

I am not selling anything. There is no paywall. There is a print button that will print a single section clean. If you want to pin a tap chart over your drill press, that is what the button is for. I tested it.

The list above my bench is going to come down soon. Not because I do not need it. I will still need it. But the file is going to be the thing I reach for. The list will still be there in spirit. The Almanac is just the version of it that does not blow away when I open the door.

The Maker Almanac lives at https://mbparks.com/almanac. It is free. It works offline. It is not done, because nothing I make is ever done, but it works, and you can use it today.

If you have a thing you wish was on the list, tell me. I will build it. The whole point of an almanac is that it keeps growing.