WestKentucky
Member
I have been further playing with my el cheapo digital scale. I found myself forcing the scale off of zero to a known amount (yay paperclip) and then weighing individual granules of extruded stick powders. Has anybody ever done a study on what the normal weight per granule of a given powder is? I understand it would likely fluctuate by lot so the info may not be very useful. Playing with a few granules of IMR 4350 I found that they very consistently weighed 0.04 gr and that if I put exactly 10 granules (any random 10) that it ALWAYS read .39 gr. This tells me that each granule of powder in my can weighs between 0.0395 and .04 or else the rounding would have kicked it off of an even .04 interval earlier.
I also messed with some 3031 but I didn’t do nearly as much as I did with the 4350.
One thing I dislike about this scale is that I have to preload it to get it off of zero. It must have some programming that holds it at zero until a certain point before it will display anything other than zero. I can get around it but I don’t like that. I prefer to preload at this point, although a gentle tap of a dipper got it off of zero every time but it simply will not weigh out itty bitty charges without a preload. I will have to make a calibrated preload of some even number and use that if I use this scale for individually weighed charges, but for verification of powder drop it will be perfectly fine since it moves off of zero somewhere around 0.25gr.
On topic of weight of a granule of powder, I realize ball powder is essentially a lost cause for weighing a single grain. Flake would also be difficult, but much easier than ball. Stick is by far the easiest and for counting purposes it seems it’s the only one that would be useful for loading purposes. A man might count out 30 sticks of powder or some such as a measure to maintain consistency but nobody is going to count out 1000 granules of ball powder or 500 flakes.
I also messed with some 3031 but I didn’t do nearly as much as I did with the 4350.
One thing I dislike about this scale is that I have to preload it to get it off of zero. It must have some programming that holds it at zero until a certain point before it will display anything other than zero. I can get around it but I don’t like that. I prefer to preload at this point, although a gentle tap of a dipper got it off of zero every time but it simply will not weigh out itty bitty charges without a preload. I will have to make a calibrated preload of some even number and use that if I use this scale for individually weighed charges, but for verification of powder drop it will be perfectly fine since it moves off of zero somewhere around 0.25gr.
On topic of weight of a granule of powder, I realize ball powder is essentially a lost cause for weighing a single grain. Flake would also be difficult, but much easier than ball. Stick is by far the easiest and for counting purposes it seems it’s the only one that would be useful for loading purposes. A man might count out 30 sticks of powder or some such as a measure to maintain consistency but nobody is going to count out 1000 granules of ball powder or 500 flakes.