Quick and Easy Homestead Scales
Homesteader shares how he built homemade, accurate scales cheaply and easily.
March/April 1976
By Gordon Solberg
A couple of months ago, my wife and I went into town to buy a scale. We'd decided to tighten up our rabbit raising operation . . . and figured that if we could weigh the feed going in and the bunnies coming out, we'd have a better handle on the efficiency (or lack of it) of the whole enterprise.
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We came home disillusioned. The, scale most suited to our purpose cost $14.00 and only weighed to an accuracy of 1/10 pound. Now $14.00 is a lot of money to us . . . especially for an item that seemed to me worth about five bucks.
Then I remembered my trusty old Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, and its table which listed the weight of water to five decimal places. And I thought to myself: I've got a whole well full of water! This set in motion a chain of events which finally led me to construct a couple of sets of scales both every bit as accurate as those in town—at a cost of nothing!
The first scale I made was a simple carpenter's level" balance. (The little spirit bubble made a fine balance indicator.) I wired a burlap sack to one end of the level, and an empty paint bucket to the other (see Photo 1). Then I tied a string around the middle, suspended the whole mess, and shifted things back and forth until the level was . . . well, level.
Next, I put a bunny in the burlap sack and poured water into the bucket until everything balanced again. Finally, with the rabbit safely back in its cage, I measured the water with an ordinary measuring cup divided into fluid ounces . . . and there was the weight of the rabbit! I estimated my error as plus or minus an ounce . . . not bad for a scale that I had put together in five minutes!
Chemists, of course, have developed the measurement of fluids into an art. With a graduated cylinder you can determine the volume of water to within tiny fractions of an ounce. (If you ever required this kind of accuracy you'd need to know the water's temperature too, since its density does change with temperature. For most situations, however, you can figure that a gallon of cool water weighs 8.33 pounds.)
The main disadvantage of a simple balance, such as the one I rigged up from my carpenter's level, is that you have to measure water each time you want to weigh something. After I'd been through that more than I liked, I began to think about making a balance-type scale that I could calibrate just once . . . complete with a pointer, counterweight, and other fancy features. Then I had an even better idea.
I decided to construct the simplest of all scales: a spring scale. All I had to do, I figured, was hang up a spring, dangle a known amount of water from the end, and mark how far the spring stretched. And it worked! This simple act of calibration can, I found, transform an ordinary spring into the equivalent of a $14.00 scale.
