I'm of the opinion that everyone's first scale should be a well-made
balance beam. I had been using the same RCBS
505 since the late 70's, until I got a deal on a Dillon
Eliminator (the same scale made by
Ohaus in
blue), then my son borrowed it and it's still on the job over at his house.
Both RCBS and Dillon have dropped those scales from their lineup, but Ohaus still makes a balance beam and there are plenty of the older models being sold and traded. Ohaus also sold a 505 with their name on it. Then there are the Ohaus 5-10 and 10-10 series.
Electronic scales are nice, easy and quick, but they always eventually go bonkers. I own several myself, so I can't knock them too hard. But they have definite drawbacks like warm-up, wandering, always being effected by all the things
you can't see (friction, batteries, power spikes, drafts, magnetic fields, software glitches, etc). And humans have a distinct short-coming in that '
if they can't see it, then they believe it's not there'.
Thus, if you go electronic, then also buy a set of "
check weights" for the range you'll be loading.
Never use the scale's own 20 gram check weight and then assume the scale is accurate at 4.7 grains. This because 20 gram equals 308.6 grains, which is "in the next county" compared to 4.7gr.
What you've got to remember about digital scales is that they ALWAYS fail in one particular weight zone, and hardly ever across the board. (Whereas balance beams can only 'fail' as a fixed percentage.) So a digital can be dead nuts on at 100 grains and be 2 or 3 grains off in the 5 grain region. And that's why you need a 5 grain check weight. If we chart this failure mode out, it looks like this....
The digital can read both high and low, while the balance beam is a constantThe digital can be low at the upper end due to friction and high at the lower end due to thermal drafts... and this type of '
bonkers' plots like a
curved line. On the other hand, the balance beam may be a percentage off, but it's off by a
constant... which plots as a
straight line. When that happens you can fully restore the balance beam by honing the teeter-totter knives, but the digital scale is trash... they cannot be repaired.
And while we're on the subject... do you ever see the readout on your digital flicker between (say for instance) 3.2gr and 3.3gr ? That's completely normal. But no one ever asks why the same scale doesn't flicker at Zero.
The same vibrations and thermal situation is certainly present !! Well, the flicker is suppressed at Zero within the
software to make the user believe the scale is more accurate than it is. And if software is playing those tricks, what else is it doing ? And believe this: if you have an electronic scale, then you DO have software converting electronic signals into a numeric display.
Like I said, nothing wrong with digital scales, but you should go into that purchase knowing a lot more.
Hope this helps.
