And Cannabis buyers, to make sure they’re not getting screwed. You’d be surprised to learn how much stems and seeds weigh 
I have a 500g scale that has .1 accuracy, good enough for me, even has seven weighing modes, most pocket scales only have two or three.
Cool, I have a 500g pocket scale with .01g accuracy that I use for blending cooking spices for marindes, steak and rib rubs as well as weighing out ingredients for baking my medicated edibles.
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Correction, .01g accuracy, having trouble editing on my android tablet. The 500g is good enough for me for most jobs. For larger weighing jobs needing a bigger platform, mixing ground meats for meatloaf, baking bread, etc., I have a 5k Taylor digital with two modes. However, with my 500g calibration weight, it scales at 498g, not too happy about that though.
You ever see Full Metal Jacket? That’s Bambi’s war face LOL 
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Where is the “quanto basta” button?
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Why would you want to know that?
If you don’t need 3 cups of au jus, you’re doing it wrong.
/American
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You don’t have to actually be dealing drugs to need scales, you might just want them to check you’re not getting short weights, or to split up a large order between a few friends.
ahem
Or so I hear.
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That’s nothing. By simply not cleaning it, I have brought down my standard issue kitchen scales down to 0.0 readability!
A $100 bill weighs 1 gram. Do not ask me how I know this.
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We used to weigh the $100’s ten grand at a time when I worked it a bank. I don’t know why, because we had relatively few compared to the other currency, so I figured that we should just count them like everything else.
Years later, we quit weighing them and counted them like the rest of the currency, but officially it was the idea of someone upstairs whose opinion mattered
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My grandmother, a nurse, carried a small portable set of scales for medicines. The scale (circa 1900) is an equal-arm balance with glass pans. The included weights are 1 and 2 drams, 1, 1.5, and 2 scruples, and 5 grains, giving a range of up to 275 grains (17.82 grams) with 5 grain (324 mg) resolution.
The larger weights are cast rectangular tokens, but the 5 grain weight is just a roughly rectangular bit of brass sheet with “5 grains” stamped on it. Clearly someone just sheared off bits of metal until the weight was right. I thought it was homemade, but a bit of googling shows that the sets came from the factory that way.
Having watched the TV series The Knick, I now wonder if the scales ever weighed cocaine.
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A scale with at least 0,01g readability is a must. Can even be a matter of life and death in certain situations. But really, no matter who you are or what you use it for, a good scale is a must.
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Tell your mom it’s better to be grey than bald
Er, obviously not, or all of the scaleless among us would be dead. Sure, I have three and covet another, but definitely not a must, and certainly not life or death, for most people.
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*dies*
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I said it can be a matter of life and death in SOME situations (which usually involve idiots and micrograms). I said that no matter what you use it for, a good scale is a must; cooking, chemistry, whatever, it’s an important tool to have around the house. I’m pretty sure I worded myself correctly this time, so you must have misread or just wanted to take it the wrong way.
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For micrograms, a possible workaround for dividing a dose is dissolving a larger, easier-to-measure dose in a suitable solvent, then take fractions of the solution’s volume.
This method is one of the survivalist way to dose potassium iodide in case of an atomic mishap. A saturated solution is easy to make (add the iodide to water until it does not dissolve anymore and then add some more), and the concentration is dependent on temperature, which is easy to measure. A drop of the solution has a roughly constant volume so drop-counting is an alternative for smaller doses to pipetting or other volume measurements. Those plastic Pasteur pipettes are also cheap and easy to find.
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There are four basic functional components need to make a scale with that kind of sensitivity, accuracy, repeatability and stability. Also, you need very good calibrated master masses for traceability.
- An optical sensor to determine the position of the transducer.
- A voice coil transducer, essentially an electro-magnet that drives another magnet using variable force until the optical sensor is brought back to a repeatable position.
- A very good voltage sensor and automated variable DC voltage driver that adjusts the output force of the voice coil and measures the voltage it is putting out. (OK, maybe this is two components.)
- What we typically called a “swiss cheese block”, that is, a complex compound set of force magnification levers machined out of a block of metal so that there was a very large mechanical advantage acting through multiple “living” hinges. Imagine a very high gear ratio that could only act through a very small rotation.
When implemented correctly the change in force is directly proportional to the voltage required to return the voice coil to the same position, which ties directly to weight and mass at the other end of the linkage.
The devices also had some mechanical “fuses” and over-travel stops, but those were passive protections for the measurement goods. I didn’t design these things, though I did hack some of them up to create new attachment points for our applications.
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