The wall's Bench gear shelf covers the machines: heat guns, contact cement, Dremels, boards, the kit and its settings, in the shelf's own words. This guide is the rest of what makes builds work: the lists, the settings and the paperwork the app and this site actually document. It says plainly what's not here: no brand reviews, no price lists, no coverage tables, the apps' engines are the source of numbers on this site, and the apps publish lists and math, not product verdicts. The store sells the app seat and the gear; this page organizes the knowledge.
The app's organizing unit is the element: each costume project divides into elements (a helmet, a pauldron, a sword), and each element runs one stage ladder, Patterned → Cut → Assembled → Primed → Painted → Rigged → Done, with its materials moving Need → Ordered → Owned → Used. Hours get estimated and then logged against the estimate, and costs roll up from elements to the project's budget. When a calculator produces a quantity, sheets, cast parts, resistor counts, battery mAh, it saves as its own materials row with the exact inputs kept, so the number on the shopping list can be re-run and checked, not just trusted.
On paper, this site prints the same loop as four build sheets: the prop parts & shopping list ("one line per part: what it is, how many, which store, with a got-it tick"), the LED battery cheat, the per-costume build log (date, task, hours, spend, next step) and the gesture calibration card. The con planner runs the calendar side, boards per costume, days to the doors, and its own rule of thumb on the page: printing + smoothing + painting usually wants three weekends per big piece; start the helmet first.
The app's default packing kit carries nine lines, honest, generic labels, no brands:
Every line can be checked off and assigned to a build element, the spare cloak clasp lives with the cloak's bag, and a deliberately emptied kit stays empty instead of quietly refilling. The kit edits ride along in the app's project archive, so the list you tuned survives moving phones.
Power is where gear opinions matter most and where the app keeps its head down: its battery library stores named reference packs with the manufacturers' own numbers, and leaves what is unknown marked unknown. The Battery library & fit tool compares stored energy, package fit (with a clearance input) and the continuous-current check, then tells you plainly what passed and what stays unestablished.
| Reference pack | Capacity | Max size (mm) | Continuous limit | The plain note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Adafruit protected 18650 #1781 | 2,200 mAh | 69 × 19 × 19 | 2.2 A | Rated at cell voltage; regulator required for 5 V LEDs |
| Keeppower ICR14500-1000 (bare cell) | 1,000 mAh | 48.8 × 14.3 × 14.3 | 1.9 A | Holder, protection and wiring add space |
| Vapcell INR10440 (bare cell) | 320 mAh | 43 × 10.1 × 10.1 | 3.0 A | Typical rating; add holder/protection space |
| Adafruit flat LiPo #258 | 1,200 mAh | 62.5 × 35.5 × 5.2 | not stated | Datasheet standard discharge 0.5 C (600 mA) |
| Anker PowerCore 5000 | 5,000 mAh | 108 × 33 × 33 | 5 V / 2 A out | 18.5 Wh; may shut off below 50 mA draw |
| Energizer CR2032 | 235 mAh | 20 × 20 × 3.2 | — | Rated at ~0.19 mA drain, a low-drain reference only |
The battery math itself lives in the wearable-LED guide and the lab's planners; the bench point is the shape of The plainy, unknown continuous limits stay unknown, bare-cell dimensions exclude holders, and a passed arithmetic check does not certify electrical or wearable suitability. The tool says so; so does this guide.
The app carries eighteen calculators, grouped by craft. This is the gear-adjacent part of the kit: every tool turns a measurement into a cut list or a shopping line.
| Group | Tools |
|---|---|
| EVA & thermoplastic | Foam cylinder · Tapered bracer · Bevel setback · Sheet & roll coverage · Rectangular nesting · Paint & adhesive coverage |
| Light & power | LED resistor · NeoPixel & battery · Battery compartment · Series / parallel LED layout · Battery library & fit |
| Molding & casting | Silicone & resin mix · Casting material library |
| Soft goods | Circle skirt & cape · Continuous bias tape · Pleat layout · Gores & hooded cloak |
| Scaling | Scale & material impact |
| Ladder rung | What the app holds at that rung |
|---|---|
| Patterned | Tape says forearm 26 cm, bracer height 16 cm → the tapered bracer tool runs the template arc |
| Cut → Assembled | The tool's output saves as a materials row with the exact inputs kept (26 cm, 16 cm, 45° bevel) — the row is re-runnable, the number is checkable, not trusted |
| Primed → Painted | The coverage tool takes the label coverage off the can actually bought; 2–3 light coats counted as applications |
| Rigged → Done | Straps, LED battery line, the wrist rig's cue — each its own materials row (the battery library's named packs carry the manufacturers' numbers) |
The same rung ladder lands on this site as the prop parts & shopping list sheet, "one line per part: what it is, how many, which store, with a got-it tick", and the planner carries the element as one board tile with its own note. Hours get estimated, logged against the estimate, and costs roll up from elements to the project's budget, the paperwork the ladder actually produces.
Two house rules keep the tools trustworthy. First, the tool that estimates purchases refuses to know consumables you haven't measured: the Paint & adhesive coverage tool takes the label coverage off the can you bought, the app and this site publish no brand-by-brand coverage tables and no drying-times chart, on purpose. Second, the small material/battery/sheet reference library is a snapshot, not gospel: product instructions always take precedence over it, its entries carry the manufacturers' own source pages, and exact variants are kept exact (a 100:130-by-weight mix is not a 1:1-by-volume guess, and the two are separate data).
A workbench phone lives a rough life, foam dust, resin fingers, glue everywhere. The app's design answers that directly: it requests no Internet access at all, and the mesh work states it on-screen, all geometry and measurements stay on the device. With gloved or full hands, capture still works: the camera offers touch capture, volume-button capture, and an optional voice shutter (one on-device English command on supported Android 12+ devices). The pocket tool is a plastic card: the caliper measures from a manually marked 85.60 × 53.98 mm rectangle, in either orientation, the one reference object every wallet already owns. Backups are local folders and exportable archive files, not a cloud account.
| Symptom | Cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Runtime fell short of the estimate | Estimates assume your efficiency and usable-capacity factors | Measure the bank and animation together; size for peak current, not average |
| A power bank cut out mid-piece | Some packs shut off at low draw (the 5,000 mAh reference notes it below 50 mA) | Match the pack's output behavior to the idle draw; the library's notes are the record |
| A sized resistor runs hot | The 2× power margin is a rating floor, and band colors don't set tolerance | Re-check dissipation; "buy the selected tolerance", five bands don't make a resistor 1% accurate |
| The bare cell didn't fit | Library dimensions are the bare cell, holder, protection, wiring add space | Use the compartment tool's clearance input on the whole protected pack |
| The cure timer rang; it's still tacky | A timer never confirms cure, temperature, mass and mold move the clock | Early-test a corner trim (the casting guide's rule) |
| No catalog entry for your material | The library is a snapshot, not a catalog | Pick the custom input and copy ratio, basis and density from the current data sheet |