And I should clarify the "900 pounds empty" comment. You really need your scales to go all the way to GROSS weight, in order to get exact locations for pilot, fuel, baggage, etc. If it's a tri-gear, the weight is distributed more equally between the three, and then we'd need three scales, rather than just two, but they would not need to have as high a weight rating as a taildragger, which has most of the weight on the main wheels with only a small amount on the tail. The tri-gear problem can be worked around to some extent with a bathroom scale, since you'll have two other scales by which to calibrate the bathroom scale, but concentrated loads from the tires can skew results. I usually use some plates of aluminum to spread the load, which seems to give decent results. This keeps the load cells vertically loaded, rather than side loaded or otherwise tweaked.
I also have a set of pretty accurate digital bathroom scales, and can bring them as well. The main problem with digital bathroom scales is that they tend to wait a few seconds and then lock on a reading, which doesn't always work well while you're positioning the plane on the scales. The cure, whether tailwheel or mainwheel, is to wait until everything is positioned, then lift or lower the tail to remove weight from the third wheel, let the scales reset to zero, then gently put the wheel back on the scales to stabilize and lock in a reading. Those wanting to do this at home can see the process and a downloadable sample weight and balance spreadsheet at http://www.n56ml.com/wb/index.html Mark Langford ML at N56ML.com website at http://www.N56ML.com --------------------------------------------------------
