I'm having fun with my $10 digital scale that has 0.01g readability

So if I order this in addition to that pressure cooker I ordered back in November and my semi-yearly orders of salt petre I’m screwed?

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While at my previous employer I had occasion to design some instruments that incorporated the guts of .01 milligram sensitive Sartorious force-rebalance analytical balances.

Those scales were so accurate that not only could they pick up the difference in the weight of a piece of paper left by the ink trail of ball-point-pen. Given the accuracy of the scales, and a bit of experimentation, you could do a pretty good job of determining the length of the ink marks based on the weight of the ink.

Fun stuff, and I was getting paid to do it!

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Ohhh! 10 microgram sensitivity!! How did they do that???

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One of the research labs I worked in had one of these bad boys…
http://balance.balances.com/scales/781

Sub-microgram level and a right PITA to use. You could see the damned stuff absorbing moisture as you weighed it.

Nice work. :smiley: I’ve only ever been an end-user for them. Great bits of kit, though.

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I thought there were two kinds of people who bought those: drug dealers and scumbags who buy gold and silver for half the real price.

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A common 0.1mg resolution analytical lab scale, the kind with those knobs that add weights to the balance mechanism, is enough to see this effect. Gravimetric analysis FTW - not.

Edit: It could be worse. It could be losing mass - by sublimating/evaporating from the sample and condensing in the supersensitive mechanism of the scale. And, even worse, corroding it.

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Probably… I hope you don’t have sinus congestion and maybe some cash on hand, 'cause then you’ll be extra screwed :-0

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I should probably stop using pseudo-ephedrine as a hang over cure now that I think about it.

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My perents are blind enough they don’t notice the greys :smile:

N-acetyl cysteine, an OTC cough remedy, is a good hangover prophylaxis. Replenishes glutathione in liver, which is needed for alcohol degradation. (Incidentally, same mechanism is exploited in its use for paracetamol poisoning. Competition for glutathione by alcohol is the basis of its enhancing of paracetamol toxicity.)

Together with vitamins of the B group it is the main component of those expensive-as-hell hangover remedies.

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I have one that’s similar to Mark’s, and what I’ve found it really useful for is brewing (specifically, mead, where getting the acidity right for a gallon batch means you want something more precise than just 1/8 teaspoon), but it’s also meant I could listen to check out some of those “19 grams of coffee beans per this much water” coffee-fiend instructions.

The scale says it’s accurate to 0.01g for up to 100g, or 0.1g for up to 500g, (or whatever fractions of ounces and grains), which was a reasonable compromise between brewing chemistry and kitchen use; for European cooking recipes, which use weight instead of volume, I’d need one that could handle 1-2kg, but those only have ~1g precision or sometimes less.

Yeah, time to switch to real ephedrine…

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Hey, I think we just found the real Dread Pirate Roberts!

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*you’re

You’re welcome. :smiley:

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You can supposedly make your own microgram balance from a cheeseboard and a galvanometer.

I have an old mechanical balance (like this one) that I found in a skip/dumpster. It’s accurate to +/-100 micrograms, and never needs calibrating, because it uses counterweights.

When I first tested it, I found it was more accurate than the digital scales in my Uni department’s research lab- those had been incorrectly calibrated for several months. The PhD students who had been relying on them were not amused.

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No love for 1kg @ 0.1g scales?

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The headline accurately states only readability. I like that.

Why is the deer shitting?

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Just like getting an IR thermometer (I know they’re not deadly accurate), it’s hard not to run around BEEPing at everything and announcing the current surface temperature of, say a pair of socks.

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