2003-04-05 Do these balances strictly display in grams or are the selectable? When you open the package, is the selection pre-set for SI or FFU? Is Salter an American company? Where are the balances made?
Also, could you measure the amount of mass in large M&M bags to see if you get consistent readings over 400 g? I think it is ridiculous that Mars Candies insists on labelling the packages as 396.x g when they could legally label them as 400 g, since I've found them to be always over 400 g so far. John ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jim Elwell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Saturday, 2003-04-05 10:18 Subject: [USMA:25432] kitchen scales > My wife and I have been researching electronic kitchen scales, and I've > found out some interesting things. > > The first one we bought (Salter 1002.jpg, $69 locally) has a cool-looking > glass platform, four load-cell/strain gauge sensors, and a resolution of 2 > g from 0 to 5000 g. It is also slow to respond, and has excess hysteresis, > on the order of 4 g. I tested it with some calibration weights and it was > reasonably accurate, not exceeding 5% error with any of my weights (5 g > through 1 kg). > > However, for kitchen use it worked fine, until I dropped a full jar of > peanut butter on it and busted one of the aluminum load cells (although the > glass platform survived). > > Then we bought another (Salter 2001.jpg, $36 on the web). It is not nearly > as cool looking, but has a resolution of 1 g from 0 to 2000 g, and 2 g from > 2000 to 5000 g, is faster to respond, has very low hysteresis (< 1 g, > perhaps a bit too low), and was never off by more than 1% with any of my > calibration weights. I haven't been allowed to disassemble it (haven't > broken it yet), but my guess is there are probably three strain bridge load > cells under the platform. > > The other interesting thing: average-size almonds weigh very close to 1 g > each. I was measuring 30 g of them, then counted them: 29. I tried it five > more times from a bag of Blue Diamond roasted almonds: 30,32,32,30,31. > > > Jim Elwell, CAMS > Electrical Engineer > Industrial manufacturing manager > Salt Lake City, Utah, USA > www.qsicorp.com >
