Practical Powder Measurement System for Analog Scales - No Zero Drift

[J Willey]

Hi All,

I’m hoping to get some feedback on a product that I’m thinking about selling but don’t yet have the means to produce it with reasonable effort. So thanks for taking a look, and thanks a lot for commenting if you can. Is it practical? Would you be interested? Any suggestions?

I developed this over the past few years after finally giving up on (reasonably priced) electronic scales. My day job is in a laboratory where our rule for zero drift is a maximum of %1 of expected measurement range over 24 hours. So I know a little bit about measurement in general. Some of the scales I tried at home had more than 10% drift in under a minute. I do suppose there are decent scales out there ($$$$$), but I will contend that if you have to zero before every load (like automatic units), and even between every batch, you really don’t know how much powder you're dropping.

The problem is that old fashioned analog scales are practically unusable. They are clumsy on the benchtop. Easily knocked around. Virtually impossible to read consistently due to parallax error, not to mention the horrible ergonomics of trying to line your eye up on it while it’s in a usable location. They are extremely sensitive to even the slightest draft in your work space, even the draft caused by slowly moving your arm close by. And they do suffer zero shift as dust accumulates, although this is much more on the order of <1% in 24 hours.

So I think I solved all that. For my large batches and pistol rounds I love my RCBS Uniflow. But for my precision work this seems to be pretty ok.

Thoughts?

J Willey

 

[NoDopes]

Looks cool.

I was thinking of creating something like this years ago as well. I was going to just use a basic mount for cell phone and use the camera. The base seems very large. How easy is it to dump the powder to change it out? Looks a bit clunky. Does the motor easily separate?

 

[J Willey]

Looks cool.

I was thinking of creating something like this years ago as well. I was going to just use a basic mount for cell phone and use the camera. The base seems very large. How easy is it to dump the powder to change it out? Looks a bit clunky. Does the motor easily separate?

Hi, and thanks for asking.
The trickler unit is clunky, but cleaning it takes actually less effort than an old fashioned manual trickler. The motor doesn't come off easily, but no disassembly is required for cleaning or changing powder. There are no spaces for the powder to creep into. All interfaces are fully sealed and there is no relative motion between moving parts. So all you have to do is dump it and then give it a little blow out.